Re: IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80x24 display

Ben Collver <bencollver@tilde.pink> wrote or quoted:

One Retrocomputing StackExchange answer claims that terminals with
72-character lines show "the struggle for 80 characters", with
72-character terminals falling short of the 80-character goal.
However, 72-character lines were a deliberate choice to capture the
lucrative Teletype market; teleprinters such as the Teletype Model 33
printed 72-character lines. (The model number of the Datapoint 3300
(1969), for instance, reflects the Teletype Model 33.)

  Raymond Hettinger (transcribed, shortened and partially paraphrased
  by me [Stefan Ram]):

|The line-width part of PEP 8 bugs me.
|
|You have to wrap your commits in seventy-two characters. You have
|to end your lines at seventy-nine characters.
|
|One time it bugs me is when I'm writing unit tests.
|
|When I write unit tests, I have to start with a class, and then
|inside the class there's a "def" for tests, and then the test
|starts with a "self.assertEqual", and by then most of my line
|is gone. So by the time I get to any business logic in my test,
|I'm near the end of the line.
|
|If I go over seventy-nine characters, somebody will come and
|PEP 8 me.
|
|They'll come in and say: "Oh, Raymond's line hit eighty-one
|characters, I'm going to PEP 8 it!". And so, while I'm not
|looking, they come in and reformat my code.
|
|They'll just throw a line break at a really awkward place.
|
|Does that make the code better?
|
|So, to escape that pressure, I think: Maybe I can just commit
|a little atrocity and that way no one will ever come and PEP 8 me.
|I'll just shorten my variable names.
|
|Does that make the code better?
|
freely adapted from Raymond Hettinger