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Comment by kenforthewin | Hacker News Reader

This website's background color is considered harmful, and "considered harmful" essays are considered harmful.

Site is also non-responsive with <meta name="viewport" content="width=640" />, looks horrifying on the 12.9’’ iPad Pro even without taking color scheme into account. I know complaining about blog design is out of scope, but if @tonsky is reading this thread, please consider fixing your meta viewport tag.

> I hope you have a wide enough monitor to read this.

Perhaps they're merely unaware of how their website looks?

This part also tripped me up since I _was_ on a large monitor but the width was tiny.

Or they use some special monospace font where 157 characters at 16px could somehow fit into a 544px wide column (well, that still got nothing to do with monitor width, though).

That refers to a <pre> block with no carriage returns, which ordinarily wouldn't wrap.

Yeah, I did think it was amusing reading that on my 27" 2550px wide monitor monitor that the site formatted it so narrowly. https://i.imgur.com/VG31Kpj.png

For body copy that line length is pretty much ideal (for readability), but the code blocks could definitely benefit from being as wide as possible...

Yeah, the reading experience was pretty comfortable. Just thought it was amusing that the author hoped I had a big monitor when the author constrains the code blocks to such a narrow width.

I always see people complain about the narrowness of Medium and think they're overreacting, but this site is pretty extreme. I could fit 3 of these side-by-side across my 13" MacBook Pro's screen.

> I know complaining about blog design is out of scope

In this case, considering the topic, such a complaint is really warranted. A set of sensible defaults for that blog would have made it more readable — the blog design is pretty much a rebuttal of the content.

I changed the CSS before reading

After reading this I agree that SwiftUI terrible. I still don't get why it's considered "harmful" though.

This is basically a clickbait title at this point. After a now-famous CS letter by Dijkstra, "Go To Statement Considered Harmful"[1], the title format expanded dramatically. I'm personally a large fan of Meyer's '"Considered Harmful" Essays Considered Harmful'[2] as a explanation and satire of the genre. Wikipedia also has a decent summary[3].

1: https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.p... 2: https://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful

This letter was also a classic example of how writers don't always choose titles, editors do.

Edsger Dijkstra's original title was "A Case Against the Goto Statement". Niklaus Wirth was editor of the Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) at the time and changed the title to the now infamous "Go To Statement Considered Harmful".

Explaining "Considered Harmful" Essays Considered Harmful

The background made me think Flux turned on spontaneously.

Agreed. Going from a solarized-themed HN to that link was simply painful.

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