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Programming With Proportional Fonts?

Posted by timothy on from the now-that's-wild-and-crazy dept.

theodp writes "Betty or Veronica? Mary Ann or Ginger? Proportional or Monospaced? There's renewed interest in an old blog post by Maas-Maarten Zeeman, in which M-MZ made the case for programming with proportional fonts, citing studies that show proportional fonts can be read 14% faster than fixed-width fonts. Try it for a couple of weeks, he suggests, and you might like it too. Nowadays, Lucida Grande is M-MZ's font of choice on OS X, and he uses Lucida Sans on Windows. Helvetica, anyone?"

2 of 394 comments (clear)

  1. Re:For bug-free code ... by mdenham · · Score: -1, Troll

    See, back in my day, we only had three fonts to work with - Times Roman, Courier, and Helvetica. One day I needed to make a program, and none of these fonts were cutting it. Did I mention that it was for someone I hate? Anyway, I went with the only sans-serif font we got to use, Helvetica. I hog-tied that sucker and proceeded to rape the shit out of it. It whined, it begged, it called me names for hours. Finally, exhausted, I let loose into it and left it to cry in a puddle of its own rasters.

    Nine months later, Comic Sans MS was born.

  2. Python... by Temkin · · Score: 0, Troll

    The Python zealots will be along shortly to defend their indentation insanity in 3... 2... 1...