The monospace font reminds me of the console on old Sun workstations running SunOS. It's pretty hideous. The alphanumerics feel rather slapdash, like this whole thing was put together by the foundary on a Friday afternoon and made to meet the minimum requirements but without much love.
It's easy to fix though. Just pour more Knuthian bullshit on it until the hackers think its flaws represent important aesthetic decisions. It was made by an important type foundry adhering to the strictest mathematical principles, after all!
Why does a programming language need its own font?
Why not? But seriously, it's of great benefit to Go programmers to have a font that shares the same license as Go itself. Most fonts are not so unencumbered.
Because it's extra, unnecessary cruft. May as well throw in generics as well, and inheritance and may as well develop your own OS for go while you're at it.
As you can tell I think this is just a silly waste of time for a compiler. Non native applications are near universally ugly and poorly designed and adding a custom font is just another slap in the face.
Why not? But seriously, it's of great benefit to Go programmers to have a font that shares the same license as Go itself. Most fonts are not so unencumbered.
Because it's extra, unnecessary cruft. May as well throw in generics as well, and inheritance and may as well develop your own OS for go while you're at it. As you can tell I think this is just a silly waste of time for a compiler. Non native applications are near universally ugly and poorly designed and adding a custom font is just another slap in the face.
> Because it's extra, unnecessary cruft. May as well throw in generics as well, and inheritance and may as well develop your own OS for go while you're at it.
False equivalences are fun. :-)
> As you can tell I think this is just a silly waste of time for a compiler.
But the people who did this have nothing to do with the compiler.
This reminds me of Java applications that you can immediately tell are Java because of the weird font. I don't see an advantage over using native system fonts. As far as I know you don't need a license to use fonts installed on the system running the application. Why does the font need to be bundled? The wide spread adoption of this is going to make go programs stick out like a sore thumb.
Jetbrains are the only example I've come across that provide an option for native UI elements in Java apps. To expand on your point. What about the combination of fonts and UI elements I've chosen for my desktop environment. Will this new UI toolkit ignore those choices I've made and stick to using their own font? It's bad enough already, for example on linux, where there are already two incompatible UI toolkits bein…
Eclipse is — or was, I haven't used it since 2006 — also great. Instead of using the horribleness that is Swing, they wrote their own toolkit, SWT, which uses native UI controls, and it's the only Java app I've ever used that had a native look and feel. (They did a lot of custom rendering, of course, but it was still able to feel native.)
The page itself is set in the proportional version of Go. I found it distracting to read because of the uneven character widths. The majority of the characters (like 'b', 'd', 'f', 'k', 'l', 'o', and 't') are narrow, but some common letters (mainly the 'e' and 'c') are round and wide, with generous space around them. I can't get past the impression that I'm reading paper that wrinkled when it went through the printer…
The alphabet sample image has problems too. The space after uppercase G is plentiful compared to the space after uppercase V. Granted VX is not a common letter combination but still this shows some bad kerning nonetheless.
Also I find the hyphen surprisingly wide (in the proportional version). In fact so wide that I keep thinking it's an en–dash and it reduces my reading speed: my brain has to slow down and mentally correct it to hyphen.
This fonts are pretty cool. But I don't understand why they just used Roboto or Noto fonts.
Roboto appears to be licensed under Apache 2.0. Noto under SIL Open Font license.
As these fonts are purportedly intended for testing purposes, presumably they will be included in the package. Adding additional licenses to the codebase complicates the usage. You might agree to the terms of the Go license, but not the Apache license, for instance.
Since this new font is licensed under the Go license, there is only one set of terms you need to agree to. This is a much better situation for many reasons.
Why not? But seriously, it's of great benefit to Go programmers to have a font that shares the same license as Go itself. Most fonts are not so unencumbered.
Because it's extra, unnecessary cruft. May as well throw in generics as well, and inheritance and may as well develop your own OS for go while you're at it. As you can tell I think this is just a silly waste of time for a compiler. Non native applications are near universally ugly and poorly designed and adding a custom font is just another slap in the face.
Extra cruft from a technical perspective, but it is clear that the law was the primary driver here.
I just got this set up on a Linux system and I think these fonts are absolutely fantastic. This is the only "programmer's font" I've tried that was ever any good.