Dr. Kiki Sanford teaches us on her latest Food Science podcast about chocolate how to definitively pronounce Theobroma Cacao.
Free font happiness! Inconsolata, Kaffeesatz and Tagesschrift
I love good fonts. It’s one of the things that I enjoy most about Mac OS X — the font rendering is *wonderful*.
Lately for programming and Terminal use, I’ve used [Inconsolata][1] by [Raph Levien][2]. It’s a very clean monospaced font that renders really well at 12 points and higher, and is perfectly usable for coding at that size. It avoids the [Vera Sans Mono][3] problems with too-thin horizontal lines at common sizes.
Tonight — thanks to [Jens Alfke][4] and his [logo design][5] for the [Mercurial][6] distributed SCM system — I’ve discovered the free fonts from [Yanone][7], specifically [Kaffeesatz][8] and [Tagesschrift][9]. Kaffeesatz in particular is a pretty slick font; hopefully I can find a use for it in something.
Any other free & open font suggestions? Let me know in the comments. I can always use more great fonts.
[1]: http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
[2]: http://www.levien.com/
[3]: http://www.bitstream.com/font_rendering/products/dev_fonts/vera.html
[4]: http://mooseyard.com/Jens/
[5]: http://mooseyard.com/Jens/2008/02/make-mine-mercurial/
[6]: http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/
[7]: http://www.yanone.de/
[8]: http://www.yanone.de/typedesign/kaffeesatz/
[9]: http://www.yanone.de/typedesign/tagesschrift/
Arc in a nutshell: It’s no Dylan (and that’s too bad)
What’s the point of [Arc][1]? Infix-syntax [Dylan][2] is a much, much better language, especially once you add in the changes and features from the [Dylan Design Notes][3] and the infix version (but keep the prefix syntax). Really, Dylan is pretty much the Ultimate Lisp in a lot of ways.
Arc is essentially `(decr Scheme)` with a couple of interesting additions to try and make up for the downsides. Downsides like a lack of international character support (what decade is it again?!) and an unhygienic macro system.
[Dylan — as designed in the **early 1990s**][4] — really is `(incr Scheme)`. It’s essentially Scheme re-hosted atop an enhanced CLOS-like object system. With the prefix syntax, it’s even very Scheme-like in actual use.
So, yeah. If you’re interested in Arc, check out Dylan. It’s a better language, and there have been implementations available for 15+ years.
PS – The original Dylan had a [`
[1]: http://www.arclanguage.org/
[2]: http://www.opendylan.org/
[3]: http://amigos.rdsathene.org/other/prefix-dylan/design-notes/home.html
[4]: http://amigos.rdsathene.org/other/prefix-dylan/book.annotated/preface.html
[5]: http://amigos.rdsathene.org/other/prefix-dylan/book.annotated/ch12.html#unicode-string-class0