[nukeop]

The author presents his own personal opinions as though they were shared by the majority of programmers, but they're not. 4:3 ratio offers little space and I found that I actually prefer ultrawide monitors (21:9) to regular HD ones. The extra width lets me open 4 emacs buffers side by side (or 5-6 if I'm editing smaller files) which gives me unparalleled possibilities for editing and comparing code. Of course when it comes to laptops I find 16:9 way better than 4:3. I don't think we're going to see too many 4:3 laptops in the future.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Where does the author imply that a majority of programmers prefer 4:3? The expressions he uses are "many of my colleagues", and "only a part of [academics and IT professionals, but] still a large group". I think they are accurate.

I do strongly prefer 4:3. As an academic, a large portion of my time is spent reading papers in PDF, and opening papers side by side is mostly useless - you want to read, not compare or copy from one to the other. When coding, it depends on how your mind works. I understand that many people may want to have several files on screen at the same time, but my mind works mostly by focusing on a single file at a time, and rapidly switching context to another. Having several windows visible at the same time distracts me.

All the author (and other people wanting 4:3, like myself) are saying is that we want to have 4:3 as an alternative. We do not want to force 4:3 on anyone, just to be able to buy laptops with 4:3 screen, even if they are a minority of the product range. Is that that much to ask? Would it be that bad for people who prefer 16:9 to have 90% of laptop screens designed for them, instead of 100%? Because as long as you are OK with that and you don't need 100% of the screens to cater to your preference, I don't see why posts like this should create any controversy at all.