JuliaMono – a monospaced font for scientific and technical computing

You input characters using the same notation as latex (IE \mu or \hbar) and then tab autocomplete to unicode. Even jupyter notebooks support that convention. Most people in Julia's target audience know latex already and so there is zero learning curve.

It did hugely simplify my scientific code where I already had variable names like hnu, omega_squared, and k_prime_prime which become arduous when checking against long equations.

Humans have been using nonlinear notation in a wide variety of fields, but computer programming languages seem especially stuck on plain text everywhere, despite the utility of such notation. I would rather faff around for a minute or two trying to figure out how to change my integration limits in a comment than leave some horrendous documentation comment like “computes the integral from a to b of the blah blah blah blah” and by this point because you can’t see the familiar notation, you first have to interpret it before checking the function. (Several PhD students I know working in applied mathematics and physics will “translate” these comments from code onto a scrap piece of paper in front of them, before attempting to dig into the function).

Personally I think it would be great if I could embed more rich text (styling, equations, and images) in comments to better communicate my intent. This stuff otherwise just winds up being left out (because it’s too hard), or in some other separate documentation which is difficult to keep in sync during development.

The over bar example you give is a bad notation independently whether it is code or not. But Unicode indices and superscripts are amazingly useful. And .dot and .kron are simply terrible notation compared to the standard Unicode operators for the same operations.

It has an alternate, lighter asterisk.

No difficulty producing columnal or tabular data on the first attempt was forseen.

When FORTRAN programming came along, you wanted the characters to line up in columns properly too, expected with the simple dot-matrix fonts.

Daisywheel printers all had mono Courier, with some starting to also autodetect mechanical PS printwheels when inserted.

Dot-matrix printers got better fonts than DOS itself but what you see on the screen was not very much of what you got on the printout the first time. PS could increase woe. Courier was available both ways. But tons of people stuck with the simple characters like you get on the cheap store receipts.

DOS text files using a monospaced font can be reselected to a different monospaced font without all the formatting difficulty you can get otherwise.

When Windows got popular, loads of people found out their old dot-matrix printer had been capable of beautiful PS output the whole time, it had just been out of reach without a WYSIWYG drafting approach.

You can still set your email window for a monospaced font, and draft a message into a Notepad window set for mono, intentionally with all the sentences of each paragraph on a single line when Word Wrap is disabled (disable Word Wrap before copying & pasting), and with a single line space between these _paragraphs_.

Then just copy & paste the whole text linewise from Notepad to different email windows and their mono spacing can be a good way to make the different local & remote word wraps work with less headaches.

Courier's remaining universalness still makes it a top choice for this type of thing, but a new monospace font that can serve as a functional superset is good to have.

Usually you just set a fallback CJK font and just not use my native language while coding - I just got better at English while writing comments in it.