7 Nov
2020
7 Nov
'20
4:44 a.m.
John Cowan writes:
On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 1:51 PM Jon Steinhart
<jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote:
As I said in my original post, we're getting into religion here.
So we have different views on monitors; I am contemplating replacing my 32"
UHD monitor with a 70" UHD TV. Why? Because I can keep everything on my
screen the same which will make everything bigger so I can put the monitor
farther away getting me out of my farsighted zone and into my 20-20 range
which would eliminate the need for glasses.
Not gonna rathole on the Shakespeare analogy - maybe I'm wrong but it's
not relevant to the point that I was making. The books that we were given
in high school didn't have pop-up translations or footnotes.
In case I wasn't clear in my original posting, the topic was mental locality
of reference issues as related to terminal size and coding style.
Jon
I've always been willing to spend buckets of
money on the monitors because
to me that's an area where bigger and higher resolution is always better.
You'd hardly want one the size of a city block, or even of a room wall.
I hated Shakespeare in high school. One of the
big reasons was that I felt
that he made up a word whenever he didn't have a good one available.
Contrary to Internet opinion, Shakespeare probably never invented any
words. At most he is the first person to record in writing a word whose
written works have survived (mostly). Why would a commercial playwright
(and Shakespeare wrote for money) use a word his audience didn't
understand? They'd boo the play off the stage, with or without rotten
fruit. He did both invent and reuse a lot of phrases: see <
https://inside.mines.edu/~jamcneil/levinquote.html>, or google for "you are
quoting Shakespeare".
The
flipping back and forth to the list of
definitions completely interrupted
the cadence of reading.
Pop-up translations would be much better, of course. I studied R&J with
footnotes; my daughter, with an across-the-page translation into
Contemporary Modern English. Of course, that meant I had to explain some
of the gallows humor to her, like Mercutio's dying words: "Seek for me
tomorrow, and you will find me a *grave* man."
While readers might "lose focus" part
of the way through long lines, that
has to
be balanced against the loss of focus that comes from 'mental
carriage-returns"
when text is too narrow and broken across several lines. Again, not
studied as
far as I know.
Lispers, of course, have only one kind of bracket, and append as many
close-brackets to each line as are needed there. (We don't count them,
Emacs and vi do the matching.) Sure saves on vertical whitespace, which
means you typically can see a whole function in one screen.