The 1/l distinction isn't that bad, but the curved quotation marks and apostrophe were enough to warrant a variant, Inconsolata-dz[1]. Looks like Inconsolata-g is actually built upon the -dz variant because it includes the straight quotation marks and apostrophe.

[1]: http://nodnod.net/2009/feb/12/adding-straight-single-and-dou...

They're not. That comparison was taken from the Inconsolata-g page and is either outdated or inaccurate. Visit the Inconsolata page to see the actual font (which hasn't changed since 2009, I believe): http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html

It wasn't a huge deal for me, but I could tell that Inconsolata-g had enough of an improvement to warrant the change.

And even strongly statically typed languages won't catch the typo if l is of type int...