[Haskell-cafe] Readable Haskell

[Ben Franksen]

Am 21.09.20 um 12:05 schrieb Ignat Insarov:
> 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]

What you and Mr. Torvalds forget is that there is a reason why
newspapers are written in relatively small columns. Even scientific
papers are often printed in two column mode. Typesetting has been done
since a few 100 years and has for the most time been an analog
technique, so it mostly wasn't limited by available resolution. The
point is that humans aren't good at reading text when the line length
exceeds roughly 80 characters because when you jump from the far right
to the far left of the text, it gets hard to correctly identify where
the next line starts. A value of 60 is ideal for non-indented text. Thus
considering indentation that is not too deep, say (usually) not
exceeding 5 levels a 4 spaces makes 20 chars, which means max. line
length is ideal at 80 and should not exceed 100 (or 90 with 2 spaces for
indentation).

I can view files in fullscreen mode if forced to do so by the author of
the code but I hate it. This has nothing to do with being old-school.

>> 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.

Using a laptop with max. 15 inch display? How old are you? People over
50 years or so usually have trouble reading such small print, no matter
how great the resolution. So (apart from the arguments above) screen
size often limits how much text can be displayed in a readable fashion.

Cheers
Ben