This article is clearly a troll, specifically the issue of monospace. Also, some monospace fonts are better than others. I was using consolas for a while, and have recently switched to ubuntu mono for the sake of beauty and clarity. I would never use a proportional font for programming, in part because positions of things matter and inform your reasoning. Here's a good blog post about beautiful programming fonts: http://hivelogic.com/articles/top-10-programming-fonts/
In particular, this claim is totally unsubstantiated: "Fixed-width fonts are a typographical oddity that survived through tradition and little else."
As a pretty young programmer, I don't use monospace or really anything only for the sake of tradition. It's the best tool for the job, even if it was by accidental means. I don't think a language optimized for proportional fonts would be superior in any way for it. In fact, monospace is superior in that you can choose to convey information with STRUCTURE. This capability becomes muddied and confused with proportional fonts.
In particular, this claim is totally unsubstantiated: "Fixed-width fonts are a typographical oddity that survived through tradition and little else."
As a pretty young programmer, I don't use monospace or really anything only for the sake of tradition. It's the best tool for the job, even if it was by accidental means. I don't think a language optimized for proportional fonts would be superior in any way for it. In fact, monospace is superior in that you can choose to convey information with STRUCTURE. This capability becomes muddied and confused with proportional fonts.