That's a bitmap font, which is really good for displays where pixels are large, but which is terrible for displays where pixels are tiny (like, say, the iPod Touch or something). Displays are getting denser, so the way to go is vector-based, not bitmapped.

Here's an interesting thought: you need to make the glyphs as different to each other as you can, for a given language model. Would a font for Lisp be different than a font for Ruby? Could you make an emacs plugin that changed lettershapes based on character probabilities?