3 ms·

I've started to spend a lot of time on HN and enjoy the community despite not being a very strong developer. The discussion here though seems to highlight a div

I've started to spend a lot of time on HN and enjoy the community despite not being a very strong developer. The discussion here though seems to highlight a divide. This is Helvetica! You can not understate its importance! If I were to try and translate this for the HN crowd I would compare Helvetica to whatever you consider to be the greatest framework of all time. We stand on the shoulders of giants and Mike Parker is one of them.

nzp 13y ago
Apart from two (two!) comments, of which one is [dead], expressing confusion about why this is important, there seems to be no divide. There's really no need to translate anything to "HN crowd" (by that I assume you really mean hacker community in general). Competent programmers (hackers) and really highly technical and highly competent people tend to appreciate good design (not just graphical design, but design in general) even if they don't know particularities of it. It's a matter of taste, and good taste is objective (PG already articulated this better than I could do[1] [2]). A couple of anecdotes: - TeX came to be because Donald Knuth was horribly annoyed with the low quality of then nascent digital typography in the first edition of The Art of Computer Programming. AMS Euler[3] typeface is a product of his collaboration with Hermann Zapf. - The first practical application of Unix was to run the typesetting in troff for technical documentation at Bell Labs. [1] http://paulgraham.com/goodart.html http://paulgraham.com/goodart.html [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMS_Euler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMS_Euler
normloman 13y ago
It's just a font, man. Chill.
radio4fan 13y ago
> You can not understate its importance! Challenge accepted! It's not important. ;-)

nzp 13y ago

Apart from two (two!) comments, of which one is [dead], expressing confusion about why this is important, there seems to be no divide. There's really no need to translate anything to "HN crowd" (by that I assume you really mean hacker community in general). Competent programmers (hackers) and really highly technical and highly competent people tend to appreciate good design (not just graphical design, but design in general) even if they don't know particularities of it. It's a matter of taste, and good taste is objective (PG already articulated this better than I could do[1] [2]). A couple of anecdotes: - TeX came to be because Donald Knuth was horribly annoyed with the low quality of then nascent digital typography in the first edition of The Art of Computer Programming. AMS Euler[3] typeface is a product of his collaboration with Hermann Zapf. - The first practical application of Unix was to run the typesetting in troff for technical documentation at Bell Labs. [1] http://paulgraham.com/goodart.html http://paulgraham.com/goodart.html [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMS_Euler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMS_Euler

normloman 13y ago

It's just a font, man. Chill.

radio4fan 13y ago

> You can not understate its importance! Challenge accepted! It's not important. ;-)