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The most expensive coding font for free?

indiegogo.com

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Re: The most expensive coding font for free?

#91

Fabrizio, have you thought about pitching this to Apple? Seriously. I personally don't get it, but it seems like the type of thing that Jobs would appreciate (if he liked it) and say it was worth the money. Ask Apple if they'd buy it for XCode, so all Apple devs could have it.

Apple just introduced a new monospaced typeface in 10.6, Menlo. (It's the default in Terminal and Xcode.) Seems unlikely they'd want to bother changing it again so soon.

Re: The most expensive coding font for free?

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't just hand-wave away market inefficiencies here. The man's fonts are being pirated--does that mean they have an intrinsic value of $0?

No, it means people are not willing to pay for it.

So he's trying to sell his font for a certain price to recoup some of those lost sales. We'll see whether the market responds. What's wrong with that?

Re: The most expensive coding font for free?

#95
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

subjective. control flow complexity is equivalent. stop talking about it.

Heaven forfend people discuss different ways to view a problem.

Yes, but on a page discussing a font ?

I completely get the reason why code blocks were first introduced in these comments, but think the "int" versus "int " discussion is offtopic.

Re: The most expensive coding font for free?

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't just hand-wave away market inefficiencies here. The man's fonts are being pirated--does that mean they have an intrinsic value of $0?

No, it means people are not willing to pay for it.

That's pretty black and white.

Indie music can always fall back on giving away tunes to support a touring and merchandising play, but someone that puts years into a font only to see it pirated isn't exactly given the opportunity to rent a tour bus.

I think that if he can make it work, he deserves our encouragement.

Re: The most expensive coding font for free?

#97
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that most of the time, people don't know what they want until they see it.

Yeah, I have tested this hypothesis on myself. I have tried lots of fonts touted as the best for programming and found exactly zero difference. Time wasted, chalked up to experience. I think that anyone considering a donation should at least try the freely available fonts to see whether they make any difference.

Why are you so determined to damn this effort? Can you imagine launching a weekend web startup project and having someone on here to look elsewhere before considering a donation?

People starting businesses come here to be encouraged, and this guy isn't doing anything wrong. In fact, I wish more creatives would consider these sorts of alternative approaches to patronage.

Re: The most expensive coding font for free?

#98
post #35
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nor would he _want_ to hire anyone to design a monospaced font for four years.

Nor is it very likely that he worked four years, every single day, on this font.

If you're genuinely interested, I'd suggest you check out the movie Helvetica.

Fonts often take thousands of man-hours to complete, and faces with extended characters are much more involved.

What this designer might lack in business chops he makes up in generousity. How many competent designers are willing to do something for $25k a year?

Re: The most expensive coding font for free?

#99
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK someone would start a company, and be an employee of that company with a wage, and make themselves the only shareholder, and then an accountant would say "pay yourself some dividends now". At least that's what people used to do, but I guess it's been stopped now.

I'm pretty sure this practice has not been stopped.

I think I'm getting confused IR35, which made contracting less attractive.

Re: The most expensive coding font for free?

#100

Does anybody have any data on how many people program in greek, cyrillic, or hebrew characters? I suspect that 90% of programs that are out there could be written with 10% of the glyphs that he is proposing to hand hint. Why not focus on those and reduce the price accordingly?

Do we really care for 9pt and 24pt either?
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