Has programming ruined your perception of round numbers?
- by Jon Purdy
Most of the world works in base 10 nowadays, but as programmers working on binary systems, we constantly find ourselves working with powers of 2. While most people consider integer multiples of powers of 10 "nice and round" and somehow aesthetically superior, I found early on in my programming adventures that multiples of powers of 2 feel much more intuitively round to me: fewer factors, of course.
I'm much more likely to lay out a Web site using, say, 8- or 16-pixel margins rather than 10 or 20, and when someone remarks that 128 is an insanely arbitrary number of ounces to be in a gallon, I have to smile a little inside at how, just perhaps, the U.S. system might be superior to metric in one small way.
I'm just curious: has programming ruined (read: altered) your perception of the roundness of a number?
