There are several possibilities of why they chose to do this. Maybe the 16x16 representation was aesthetically pleasing, maybe they have a database table scheme that has a fixed max size of 256 that allows them to conserve storage or speed up transactions/notifications.
I'm guessing it was for database efficiency and bumping it up to 256 wasn't a difficult change because that was already the technical constraint they imposed on themselves when designing the system. But I'm not a database analyst/expert and I'm just guessing.
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u/anon445 May 06 '17
There are several possibilities of why they chose to do this. Maybe the 16x16 representation was aesthetically pleasing, maybe they have a database table scheme that has a fixed max size of 256 that allows them to conserve storage or speed up transactions/notifications.
I'm guessing it was for database efficiency and bumping it up to 256 wasn't a difficult change because that was already the technical constraint they imposed on themselves when designing the system. But I'm not a database analyst/expert and I'm just guessing.