Who are the "spacists"?

[Random832]

On Sun, Mar 19, 2017, at 18:48, Mikhail V wrote:
> Sadly, many people believe that a code editor
> should be monospaced, but generally that does not
> have any sense.

It's also a bit self-reinforcing because there aren't many good coding
fonts that are proportional. And in fact there are issues for coding
usability in proportional fonts that aren't even present for monospaced
fonts. Confusables like lI1| O0 are only the beginning of the story. If
, and ' are only one pixel wide each, it's hard to tell which order they
are in. And in many proportional fonts it is difficult or impossible to
distinguish '' from ". Other issues also exist, such as """ having more
space between the ticks of a single character than between characters,
looking more like '""'. @ and % and sometimes # are too wide and too
short. Minus is too narrow, too thick, and too low owing to its design
as a hyphen (U+2212 is usually nicer, but not used in programming
languages). < and > are wide and low, which works great as relational
operators but makes them visually unpleasant as brackets - and >=
doesn't look nice either. {} are often too tall, too narrow, and a
little bit too curly.

So people try coding in the proportional fonts available on their
systems and rightly note how ugly it is.