Unpopular idea of mine (not invented by me oc): Horizontal scrolling is a great idea. The only reason it is annoying in this site is because there is no first class support for it in many touchpads and physical mouses.
Paragraphs should be 40-80 ems wide if you want them to be readable. My phone has first class support for horizontal scrolling and it still sucks.
Now if you're just talking about window management then yes I totally agree with you (See X11 "pagers" (a different approach to "workspaces") that are part of FVWM and TWM.)
Edit: I should probably include an argument instead of just an opinion: obviously scrolling is a necessity, you can’t fit all the information you want on one screen and paging is (IMO) generally worse. When you’re reading a document or paragraph you’re concerned about context. Really scrolling here in general is bad but you’re moving left and right so often enough that it makes the most sense to just wrap text and have vertical scrolling (with an image the scrolling direction really doesn’t matter it just sucks in general.) switching windows (or whatever) usually indicates some kind of mental context switch (looking at a different source file, looking at build errors, etc.) and so it doesn’t matter so much if you have to scroll (Although you’d naturally try to keep things with shared context close, preferably within one physical screen of each other, because no scrolling is still always better.)
I think the idea is to have multiple columns on screen (like some print magazine and newspaper layouts) so each paragraph is still 40-80em like you say, but you just see more of them at once. (this was roughly the Windows 8 layout guidance)
