Rasmus Andersson

Actually, I spend a week doing hands-on interviews with actual people whom had no prior programming experience. At first, I thought details like curly brackets, parenthesis and so on would put them off, but not a single person had a problem with that, to my surprise.

You might say that significant whitespace (i.e. the indentation level signifies structure) is a more natural way, but when you think about it there's no where else in these peoples lives where indentation of text determines it's function or effect. When you e.g. in Word indent text it's a purely visual effect (which might imply or give greater meaning to structure, but not define it). Thus, significant whitespace is not as natural as parenthesis and -- it turns out -- curly braces.

Now, I only did qualitative research and have yet to see a large uptake in usage. I personally use Move for 95% of everything I write nowadays and I have colleagues and friends who are also writing things in Move, so I guess time will tell if this is actually a more "natural" programming language than, say, JavaScript.

I recently wrote this update on the Move language. A sort of retrospect: http://rsms.me/2011/07/30/an-update-on-move.html

I used to be on the side of fontographers before webfonts became a thing.

Want to use a particular font for your print/screen production? Just pay for a license fee -- sure you might have to pay per weight, style, or even seat -- but at least you got to use it for your graphical productions as much as you wanted.

Enter webfonts and instead of letting those same bought license "rollover" to the new medium they created a new separate "web licence" (ok, I can pay another fee); but then some smarty pants thought it would be a good idea to charge per usage (0-50K monthly pageviews $price, 50k-100k another price etc), good grief.

Of course not all foundries do this, but this move spawned the rise of many open source fonts with free and open licenses (and initiatives like Google Fonts) so we could have an open web without another copyright license to worry about.

In other news, I just found out that Variable Fonts[1] are the thing, good times.

[1] https://rsms.me/inter/#variable

This is an Interface font, most suited for User Interfaces (Websites, Apps, etc). Almost all fonts that I have seen that distinguish the “O0 & Il” properly do not look good when used as an Interface font, but look good as an editor or something you do with it (Notes).

For instance, I set Inter[1] as my UI font in Obsidian, but I have set “Atkinson Hyperlegible Next”[2] as my Editor Font. I would gladly use such clean sans-serif fonts (Inter, Flex Sans, Geist, etc.)[3] because they are easy for the human eye to read quickly, even if there is a spelling error, and hence the distinction between the “O0 & Il” would not matter.

So, It Depends on the use case. “Atkinson Hyperlegible Next” is a fantastic, highly readable/recognizable font, but it will look pretty ugly when using it to design interfaces.

1. https://rsms.me/inter/

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkinson_Hyperlegible

3. https://vercel.com/font

System font stacks are great what I’d like more are similar “magic” values to system-ui that provide reasonably metrics-matched local fonts. The biggest reason I use system font stacks is not as much to look native as it is to try to have similar text metrics across platforms without the overhead and quirks brought by webfonts.

The system font does bring some advantages though, like on macOS/iOS where that font is San Francisco, it’s designed specifically to look good and read well on screen. Under WebKit you even get hand-tweaked letterforms, metrics, and kerning for different combos of size, weight, and context (title, subtitle, body, etc).

Something that would be really cool is if all browsers did what Apple is doing with San Francisco by shipping with a FOSS screen-oriented font like Inter UI[0].

[0]: https://rsms.me/inter/

I'm not a designer and I don't work in a design team, so I don't have much to add to the article. However I worked together with Rasmus during the early years of Spotify. It's now almost 2021 and he is still - by far - the most productive (in the Hacker News sense) and unique person I've ever worked with.

It still boggles my mind that the same person can:

(1) one hand be that stereotypical designer with the scarfs and the small cups of coffee and the Leica cameras, designing user interfaces and logotypes and brands (Spotify logotype, Spotify green color), designing popular fonts for the Internet ( https://rsms.me/inter/ )

(2) on the other hand be a great low level engineer, creating programming languages, virtual machines ( https://github.com/rsms/sol ), text editors, stuff like GraphQL, etc

A one man army for sure.

Designer here: Inter is my go-to font - a free (and incredibly made!) cross between Helvetica and SF Pro! Rasmus himself has worked at his fair share of Big Important Brands (part of the original team at Spotify, worked at Facebook, NodeJS, Dropbox, Figma) [0] and it's kinda crazy to me how much Rasmus has affected me: I see the Figma icon he created every day, I see the Spotify branding he founded, I use Inter, it's kinda crazy.

Inter is the kind of font that you use when you need something that just works. Not too fancy, not too simple, it's perfect for so many things. And it's free. And it's open source [1]. What's not to like!

[0] https://rsms.me/work
[1] https://github.com/rsms/inter

Edit: it's also not a new thing, and not a 'new SF clone' - it's been around since 2016[2].

[2] https://rsms.me/work/inter/