[Chicago] Good readings on the history of computing

[Alex MacKay]

Again, the 72 is based upon concepts of the 1950's and 1960's.  A old punch card was 80 columns long.  The last 8 (73-80) was used for line numbering.  If you dropped the deck of cards, you could easily put the program, data, back in the correct order.

On Sep 24, 2013, at 5:07 PM, Andy Boyle wrote:

> Continuing the off-topic for a moment, for those who are unaware PEP-8 was recently updated to allow for longer line length: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#maximum-line-length
> 
> "Some teams strongly prefer a longer line length. For code maintained exclusively or primarily by a team that can reach agreement on this issue, it is okay to increase the nominal line length from 80 to 100 characters (effectively increasing the maximum length to 99 characters), provided that comments and docstrings are still wrapped at 72 characters."
> 
> 
> Andy Boyle | Chicago Tribune
> News Applications Developer
> @andymboyle | andymboyle.com
> 
> 
> On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 4:49 PM, Carl Karsten <carl at personnelware.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 2:40 PM, Jason Wirth <wirth.jason at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Python is a newer language
> 
> [citation needed]
> 
> It is over 20 years old.
> 
> granted pep 8:
> http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/
> Created:05-Jul-2001
> 
> But back to your question about why 79 chars, I think because many of
> us (like me) use text based editors in text based environments like an
> ssh shell that defaults to 80 chars.
> 
> and back on topic, you may like this
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCwRGHj5jOE "26 years with Erlang or
> How I got my grey hairs"
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Carl K
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