rlw@wxlvax.UUCP (Richard L. Wexelblat) (12/01/83)
Back before the days when "structured programming" came into vogue, we had a discussion on module sizes. My opinion is that the maximum size for a module was exactly the screen size. The point is comprehension. What can you take in in a gestalt? We wrote our programs in little pieces because that was all we wanted to have to understand in a "glop." I feel the same way with mail and news. Reading news is for fun, for relaxa- tion, and for communication. In all three contexts, brevity is optimal. Agreed, many long messages are worth taking the time to read. If so, unless the value or significance is made clear in the first few lines, chances are I'll skip it. Same goes for items with semantics-free titles. By the way, blank space is sometimes useful. If logorrhetics would just use blank lines to delimit paragraphs and limit paragraphs to, say, 5 to 10 lines, their items would have a better chance of being read. Aufwiederfernschreiben, Dick Wexelblat (...decvax!ittvax!wxlvax!rlw)
notes@ucbcad.UUCP (12/04/83)
#R:wxlvax:-21000:ucbesvax:3000008:000:1258 ucbesvax!turner Dec 4 05:17:00 1983 Re: Dic Wexleblat's 1-screen meaning modules As a frequent contributor to the most opinion-oriented newsgroups (aside from net.religion, net.philosophy and net.cog-eng), I must agree that the most expressive writings found there are usually the shortest. Some writers just express a point of view, usually with more innuendo and sarcasm than fact, and then split. Which leaves those who have bothered to inform themselves more fully with the unpleasant task of either (a) filling in the blanks of an argument that they agree with, but wish had been expressed better, or (b) arguing that the (usually implicit) bases of the argument are largely false. This often requires length. The (quite natural) bias against longer notes thus militates against informed discussion. It would be nice if modules in code were all 1 screen long. It would be nice if opinions in discussion were all 1 screen long. But I have seldom written a module that required less than 1 screen of debugging. This is not to draw some facile conclusion about 1-screen (or even 1-line) notes-- not when I have heroes like Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain. But then, they didn't hack--they polished. Competent self-expression was their trade. --- Michael Turner (ucbvax!ucbesvax.turner)
lwall@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Larry Wall) (12/16/83)
Imposing an ARTIFICIAL limit like a screen size limits your available
semantic domain. You may get the Gettysburg Address onto one screen, but
you certainly won't get the Constitution even with 66 line screen.
Perhaps we should add another line to the header:
Information-Density: 5.8 wspp (worthwhile sayings per page) :-)
I agree that we should put more semantic content into our subjects, but
that tends to make longer subjects, and then the poor (nf) people complain
about subject truncation. I have a solution for this also. Notesfiles
systems should borrow some of the fancy flexname compaction algorithms
floating around in net.lang.c and compact subjects as they come onto their
system. Instead of seeing something like
Subject: IMPORTANT: imminent nuclear attack on residents of - (nf)
they could have the much superior
Subject: IMT: imtncratkonnrssoffNYC - (nf)
Really folks, all of this 6 character identifier/short subject/one screen
per article cybercrud is not reasonable. It's like saying that I'll refuse
to marry anyone over 5 ft. tall. (My wife happens to be 4'9"--luckily I
didn't mistake quantity for quality.) Hooray for everything that is the
length it ought to be, whether identifier, article, subject, or wife.
Hooray for those who try not to impose artificial limits on humanity, such as
Berkeley, the designers of Ada (with respect to identifiers), the
non-designers-of-notesfiles, and the wonderful people (who deserve more
praise than they get, especially the ones for whom it is difficult) who
take the trouble to spell and use grammar such that people don't have to
guess what they mean, for if people have to guess what you mean you can
never say anything unexpected, or they won't guess right. And if you never
say anything unexpected, what's the point of wasting everyone's phone
money?
I don't expect an argument on this, but I could be pleasantly surprised.
Larry Wall
{allegra,burdvax,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,sdcsvax}!sdcrdcf!lwall