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by zahlman
290 days ago
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(I've never seen "FCOL" before and had to look it up. For onlookers: "for crying out loud", apparently.) We aren't stuck with the terminal and CLIs. We stick with them, because they actually do have value. 80 columns is a reasonable compromise length, once you've accepted monospace text, that works with human perception, visual scanning of text etc. But many programmers nowadays don't feel beholden to this; they use any number of different IDEs, and they have their linters set varying maximum line lengths according to their taste, and make code windows whatever number of pixels wide makes sense for their monitor (or other configuration details), and set whatever comfortable font size with the corresponding implication for width in columns. (If anything, I'd guess programmers who actually get a significant amount of things done in terminal windows — like myself — are below average on AI-assisted-programming adoption.) Meanwhile, the IDE could trivially display the code in any font installed on the system, but programmers choose monospace fonts given the option. As for "plain ASCII", there just isn't a use for other characters in the code most of the time. English is dominant in the programming world for a variety of historical reasons, both internal and external. Really, all of the choices you're talking about flow naturally from the choice to describe computer programs in plain text. And we haven't even confined ourselves to that; it just turns out that trying to do it in other ways is less efficient for people who already understand how to program. |
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Monitors, keyboards, programming in textual representations, all seem quite unnatural. They were all the result of incremental technical progress, not the result of an ideal thought process. Just look at the QWERTY layout, and the limited number of people actually able to do programming.
If one reads science fiction novels from the 1970s, this is typically not the way people envisioned the 21st century.
I agree that the solutions have value, but I'm certain that we are stuck in a local optimum, and things could have been wildly different.