Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

[Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com>]

John Cowan writes:
> On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 1:51 PM Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote:
>
> > 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.

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