Is D the Answer to the One vs. Two Language High ,Performance Computing Dilemma?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 02:53:44AM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Sun, 11 Aug 2013 20:01:27 -0700
> "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> > 
> > I personally prefer single-column with no more than about 40 ems in
> > width or thereabouts. Anything more than that, and it becomes
> > uncomfortable to read.
> > 
> 
> For me, it's closer to 80. With 40 the line breaks are too frequent
> for my eyes. And it just "feels" cramped.

Wait, are you talking about 80 *characters*, or 80 ems? Most characters
are significantly narrower than 1 em, so 40 ems actually work out to
about 70 characters or so in a variable-width font (unless you have
lines full of M's, in which case readability is the least of your
problems. :-P)


> > - No full justification by default. Existing justification schemes
> > could be improved (most implementations suffer from rivers of
> > whitespace in a justified paragraph -- they could learn from LaTeX
> > here). Needs native hyphenation support (using JS to patch up this
> > flaw is a failure IMO).
> > 
> 
> To be honest, I'm not a big fan of justified text. Obviously I can
> live with it, but even without the occasional "rivers of whitespace"
> issue, I find the lack of jagged edges gives my eyes too few reference
> points, so I end up losing my place more easily. The value of
> justified text's smooth edges, to me, seems somewhat "Adrian Monk"
> (wikipedia, if you don't know).

I looked it up but didn't quite understand the reference.

In any case, I find jagged edges ineffably ugly. It just *looks* sloppy,
esp. when there are ready algorithms out there that will fix it for you
automatically. It just hearkens back to the bygone days of handwriting.
Surely such trifling limitations are no longer applicable in a digital
medium?


> > - Pixel sizes should be banned, as well as hard-coded font sizes.
> > These tie you to assumptions about specific user screen dimensions,
> > which are almost always wrong. In this day and age, the only real
> > solution is a fully dynamically adaptive layout. Everything else is
> > just a relic from paper layouts, and is a dead-end.
> 
> Yea. Admittedly, I do occasionally use pixels for a little bit of
> spacing here and there (never for more than 8px), but I can happily
> give them up - especially with so much now using those ultra-high
> pixel density screens. Pixels just don't make much sense now unless
> you're already dealing on a raster level anyway, like a photo or
> something.

Exactly!! I have a pretty high-density pixel screen, and it annoys me to
the uttermost when websites specify font sizes in pixels, which,
inevitably, are squint-inducing microscopic sizes on my screen. And even
with photos, jpegs *are* scalable to some extent, which mostly
alleviates the need for specific pixel sizes. As I said, pixel sizes are
really only applicable with images. It makes no sense at all to use
pixel sizes with text and fonts, because it bears no relation to
physical screen size at all.


[...]
> > - Unable to express simple computations on sizes, requiring
> > circumlocutions that make the CSS hard to read and maintain.
> 
> Yes! That's one of my big issues with CSS, the inability to do
> anything computationally. And yea, dealing with images tends to make
> that become more of an issue.
> 
> Ultimately, the root problem here regarding the lack of computability,
> is that HTML/CSS is not, and never has been, a UI layout format (No
> matter how much people insist on treating it as
> such...*cough*mozilla*cough*.) It's a *document* format. Always has
> been. Everything else is a kludge, and is doomed to be so from the
> start.

Even for a *document* format, it's rather limited in the kinds of
layouts it can do. All the cool CSS hacks that people pull are nothing
more than just that: hacks.


[...]
> ...And yet 9 times out of 10 it *still* ends up far more readable
> on-screen than an 8.5" x 11" two-column PDF. Go figure.

You need a better PDF reader. (Hint: Adobe Reader is not one of them.
:-P)


> > On Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 04:47:09PM -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
> > > On 8/11/2013 4:33 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> > [...]
> > > Currently ereaders are great for reading novels and such with
> > > little typography needs. But they're terrible for textbooks and
> > > reference material, mainly because the screen is both low res and
> > > is way too small.
> > > 
> > > It's like programming with an 80*24 display (I can't believe I was
> > > able to use them!).
> > [...]
> > 
> > I still program with 80*24 displays. Well, more like 80*40, but I
> > find that it's actually far more readable than the common obsession
> > with squint-inducing microscopic fonts trying to cram as much on the
> > screen as possible. Having too many characters per line quickly gets
> > very hard to read.
> > 
> 
> Heck, I started out on the 40-character-width AppleSoft BASIC.
> Although I'm sure other people can best me on that (altair, punch
> cards, etc). 

I started out with 40-character Applesoft BASIC too. I quite liked it,
it forces your code to be simple and to-the-point.  Of course, code back
in those days was also a tangled mess of GOTO's of spaghetti code, so
perhaps my memory has been tainted by nostalgia. :)


On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 11:51:29AM +0200, John Colvin wrote:
> On Monday, 12 August 2013 at 03:02:59 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >I still program with 80*24 displays. Well, more like 80*40, but I
> >find that it's actually far more readable than the common obsession
> >with squint-inducing microscopic fonts trying to cram as much on the
> >screen as possible. Having too many characters per line quickly gets
> >very hard to read.
> >
> >
> >T
> 
> I am actually going the opposite way. My go to font size when coding
> is now 8pt, I can't stand working with anything much larger.  I
> wouldn't use anything that large for publishing, but it's my
> preference for reading code.

I find 8pt completely unreadable, both in print and on-screen. In print,
I'd prefer at least 10pt or 12pt. On screen, I set my browser to force
minimum font size to 16pt, because some websites insist on using
microscopic fonts (usually by specifying pixel sizes, which is silly
since they can't possibly predict pixel density on users' screens /
browser window sizes!). The web became a lot more readable after that.
(And it also exposed a lot of flaws in HTML/CSS designs that are
hardcoded to a specific font size -- once you force the font size to be
larger than the designers anticipated, the layout breaks left right and
center. Which is silly; in this day and age, this stuff should be
automated. There's no reason why designers should still be tweaking
pixels that don't reflect what's actually displayed on the users'
screens anyway.)


T

-- 
This is not a sentence.