[Haskell-cafe] Readable Haskell

[Ignat Insarov]

Hello Ian and Mario.

> > We have retina screens, GPU accelerated rendering and magical
> > auto-completion.
>
> Who's "we"? 1 and 2 are constrained by money. 1 and 3 are also
> constrained by personal preference.
>
> I need a _big_ screen because I also do photo processing beside coding,
> and I can't afford 2 screens, one big and another high density.

> > Command shell is a very old and peculiar human interface — if human at
> > all. They had 80 character wide screens and visibly lagging connexion.
> > We have retina screens, GPU accelerated rendering and magical
> > auto-completion.
>
> You might have that.  I, as a blind braille display user,
> have one line of at most 80 characters. When I am traveling, I
> typically only have 40 characters.  Given these constraints, I still
> consider a command line interface superior to any sort of buttonized
> nonesense.  But thats just me, apparently.

This is not how I expected my message to be understood.

I did not mean to imply that every Haskell programmer has or should
have a retina screen and a high performance GPU — only that, as a
profession, we have way better tools now than back then.

In humanities, it is usual for there to be either a normal
distribution or a Pareto distribution in any large enough sample of
data. So, unlike in precise sciences, a counter-example does not
refute a proposition. What matters is that there is a trend. And there
is a trend associated with larger and finer displays. It dawns on even
the most _«old school»_ people by now. See for example a letter on
Linux Kernel Mailing List.[1]

> When I tile my terminal windows on my display, I can have 6 terminals
> visible at one time, and that's because I have them three wide. And I
> could still fit 80% of a fourth one side-by-side.
>
> And guess what? That's with my default "100x50" terminal window (go to
> your gnome terminal settings, you'll find that the 80x25 thing is just
> an initial default that you can change), not with some 80x25 one. And
> that's with a font that has anti-aliasing and isn't some pixelated
> mess.

I have no specific insight about how to optimize readability for
people that listen to code[2] or sense it with their hands. What I am
sure of is that there are better ways to go about it than dwelling in
the past.

[1]: https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/5/29/1038
[2]: https://www.vincit.fi/fi/software-development-450-words-per-minute/