Screen DPI varies widely and usually isn't correctly configured if it is at all. My main coding desktop is a little small at 14pt and probably should be a big larger. This is a pretty small monitor holds just a little more than a piece of physical paper and is driven natively at 1280x1024.
Someone with a "living room TV" sized mere 720px monitor is going to have a completely different perspective on what is too big or too small.
This is aside from the "my classes are 5000 lines long" problem which may or may not exist and may or may not be required by peculiar exceptional business needs anyway (required as opposed to being a style "problem")
And to add yet another orthogonal dimension to the problem, I code full screen using awesome as a WM... I use all of my screen for code except two text line equivalents at the top. I can see how someone who is tab bar'd menu'd windowed down at a tiny little fraction of a monitor might need a smaller font just to see anything. I've seen screens decorated up to the point that the actual content only has a post card sized space to work in, surrounded by massive unproductive clutter. They're going to need a tiny font indeed...
Someone with a "living room TV" sized mere 720px monitor is going to have a completely different perspective on what is too big or too small.
This is aside from the "my classes are 5000 lines long" problem which may or may not exist and may or may not be required by peculiar exceptional business needs anyway (required as opposed to being a style "problem")
And to add yet another orthogonal dimension to the problem, I code full screen using awesome as a WM... I use all of my screen for code except two text line equivalents at the top. I can see how someone who is tab bar'd menu'd windowed down at a tiny little fraction of a monitor might need a smaller font just to see anything. I've seen screens decorated up to the point that the actual content only has a post card sized space to work in, surrounded by massive unproductive clutter. They're going to need a tiny font indeed...