[TUHS] 80 columns ...

[Don Hopkins]

Who’s heard David Beazley tell his epic Python hacking saga? 

He’s a true hacker’s hacker, who wrote SWIG, and eats, breaths and shits Python in his sleep. 

David Beazley: Discovering Python - PyCon 2014
Speaker: David Beazley
So, what happens when you lock a Python programmer in a secret vault containing 1.5 TBytes of C++ source code and no internet connection? Find out as I describe how I used Python as a secret weapon of "discovery" in an epic legal battle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ4Sn-Y7AP8 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ4Sn-Y7AP8>

-Don

> On 10 Nov 2017, at 20:05, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
> 
> Nemo writes:
>> On 9 November 2017 at 14:14, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:
>>> At least it’s not python where the indenting makes a semantic difference.
>> 
>> And for that reason, I have never used Python.  (I have a mental block
>> about that.)
> 
> I agree on Python but for a slightly different reason.  In 1981 I wrote a
> user interface for the Tektronix microprocessor development systems.  The
> executable plus all of the script data had to fit in memory on the PDP-11.
> This was an exercise in byte-counting to make everything fit because of the
> cost of overflowing a segment by a byte.  Because of this I used indent
> level as part of the scripting language.  Got beaten to a pulp by other folks
> in the group about it and had to waste a few precious bytes processing curly
> braces instead.  So I'm too scarred to be able to use Python without cringing.
> 
> Separate from this, I think that the whole 80 column thing is a bit silly.
> I have used 132 as by default for a long time now.  Would go wider but just
> because I have always found it worthwhile spending money on the best monitors
> doesn't mean that everyone else can.  Everything including my laptop is now
> a UHD monitor which rocks!
> 
> I feel that longer lines work better than one-character variable names.
> And, longer lines are way more readable than wrapped lines.  I have never
> been fond of the notion that code should be broken up into functions for the
> purpose of keeping lines short; I feel that code should be broken up into
> functions if it makes sense to do so, for example if the functions are used
> more than once.  Writing for the limitations of the I/O device doesn't seem
> to be a good paradigm.
> 
> In any case, I don't think that being an old UNIX person means that one has
> to live in the past.  There was nothing magic about 80 columns; it was just
> the technology of the time.  Technology has changed, so move on.
> 
> Jon

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