<i>What is the Deutsch Limit?</i><p><i>A term made up by Fred Lakin describing a comment Peter Deutsch made at a VL talk by Scott Kim and Warren Robinett about a visual machine language they had invented.</i><p><i>Deutsch said something like:</i><p>> <i>"Well, this is all fine and well, but the problem with visual programming languages is that you can't have more than 50 visual primitives on the screen at the same time. How are you going to write an operating system?"</i><p><i>This points out the obvious density advantage of text. This barrier has become known as the "Deutsch Limit," stated as:</i><p>> <i>The problem with visual programming is that you can't have more than 50 visual primitives on the screen at the same time.</i><p>...<p><i>This is clearly a problem with visual representations. However, it is not immediately clear to me that a similar limit does not also exist in textual languages.</i><p><i>When textually programming I frequently use an Emacs window with about 50 lines of text on my 19" monitor. Anyone older than about 35 complains that they cannot read the text because the font is too small. I use a lot of whitespace in my programs, so we might assume that the 50 lines in the editor contain 40 meaningful lines. Most common programming styles dictate limiting the number of "primitives" or statements to one or two per line, giving my textual screen at most 80 primitives.</i><p><a href="http://www.faqs.org/faqs/visual-lang/faq" rel="nofollow">http://www.faqs.org/faqs/visual-lang/faq</a>