Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 08:41:40 -0800 From: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> To: Jason Andresen <jandrese@mitre.org>, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: C coding editor Message-ID: <200302260841.40693.wes@softweyr.com> In-Reply-To: <3E5A4BA9.5010700@mitre.org> References: <20030221122103.GA2073@asterix.local> <3E5A4264.2010801@millions.ca> <3E5A4BA9.5010700@mitre.org>
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On Monday 24 February 2003 08:43, Jason Andresen wrote:
> Stacy Millions wrote:
> > Wes Peters wrote:
> >> Terminal? You have heard of this really cool thing called
> >> windowing software? ;^)
> >>
> >> I completely utterly fail to understand why some young developers
> >> attach some sort of romance to writing code on an 80x25 screen,
> >> when all the haxxors my age or older waited (or slaved away) for
> >> years, even decades, to get something better and more flexible.
> >
> > Terminal? 80x25 screen? Bloody luxury. How 'bout ed on a 300 baud
> > DecWriter?
> > You could even have more then 80 columns, if you had the wide paper
> > :-)
>
> Heh, I started with XEmacs on FreeBSD 2.0.5 and the first thing I did
> was resize the window so it was a full 800 pixels wide. This was a
> school assignment and we had to print out our programs to turn them
> in (with the disk, apparently they didn't trust those floppies).
> Turns out that my printer (an old 24 pin dot matrix deal[1]) only
> supported 80 columns, and I ended up wasting a LOT of paper (although
> the assignment was impressively thick when I turned it in. :)
>
> After that I relegated myself to never exceeding 80 columns unless
> absolutely necessary.
As someone else on this thread pointed out, you needed a DECwriter.
They were great for playing 'trek', you didn't have to run scans
nearly as often because you could just look up a page or two and
see your last scan of this sector. ;^)
Seriously, limiting your programming for a lifetime to 80 columns
because you couldn't figure out how to make some grotty old dot
matrix printer do 8-point printing a decade ago really isn't all
that smart, is it?
I'm still disappointed at programming editors that can't make sense
of normal typefaces and have to be used with monospaced fonts. Same
for email, but that's a different argument.
> [1] Kids these days have never overheated a printer in their life.
Ah, sure they have. You'd be astonished how bad a LaserJet 4 will
streak pages when you're in the middle of printing a 500-page PDF.
But wait, kids these days don't print things like that, do they? ;^)
--
"Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"
Wes Peters Softweyr LLC
wes@softweyr.com http://softweyr.com/
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