I am a late starter in computer programming, at least for my generation. I didn’t have an interest in computing until the mid 80s. A good choice, in hindsight, because this is about when the first decent home computers begun to emerge.
In, other words, I’ve been most of my past quarter of a century, and a little more, cranking out source code in a variety of programming languages. Some were cool, some were annoying, some where crap. Some where mainstream, some were soon forgotten, some where invented by myself (and some of those thankfully remain unknown to the world).
Anyway, the point is that I spend all those many years typing code in a fixed width font such as Courier:
if (something happens) then
// ey! it worked!
tell anyone
else
try something else
end if
(Well, OK, maybe my typical code looks somewhat different, but I think you get the drift.)
As it turns out, I am currently exploring a programming environment whose principal visual novelty is to use a variable-width font by default:
if (something happens) then
// ey! it worked!
tell anyone
else
try something else
end if
How weird is that!?
Seriously. This is quite a step for a guy like me.
Related articles
- Does computer code need a new, universal language? (newscientist.com)
- Truth turns out to be far stranger than science fiction as Nasa Kepler space telescope discovers weird planets (independent.co.uk)






Scientific results published in the Lancet medical journey



