Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewjrangel | Hacker News Reader

Except I literally cannot read it

Yeah, he's doing calligraphy (either Spencerian script or Copperplate, maybe?) for coding, which is absolutely not a good hand for it. I mean, I personally take notes in cursive, but they're typically prosaic (e.g. "Fix the VPN", "Ask Steve about those CSS changes", etc).

It's some Spencerian variation, indeed. I can't fathom why he uses that paper format... Those pages are annoyingly narrow!

Also, I agree with you, Spencerian (or any other ornate script) is not the best for coding notes.

Which script would be best, in your opinion?

I'd use some italic variation, probably. If you insist on something cursive, some form of business writing would probably be better.

Of course, to each their own... (I love penmanship, and I'm fluent in several scripts, but I do my coding in Emacs, thank you very much!)

If you’re going to use a script, abbreviated Spencerian would be better. It’s more simple and legible.

I do all my coding in gregg shorthand

I know this was a joke, but do you by any chance know any shorthand? I tried to teach myself Gregg here and there years ago, but it requires more dedication than I was willing to put in to become fluent.

Gregg is not the way to go if you're looking for a shorthand that captures text in the way you would need for programming or science and I don't know of a good shorthand for this [if it wasn't already APL.]

Gregg is very much a "visible" sound system from a time when people just needed to capture the conversations and later expand back into text with the aid of a secretary. That is, if you didn't mutate your shorthand for your own purposes.

That being said, Aaron Hsu's handwriting is beautiful, but not my cup of tea for thinking on paper--my initial reaction to his scanned pages was unpleasant because it wasn't what I was used to from my own hands.

I know teeline. But programming in it seems pretty silly since half the time you are only differentiating the meaning of words using sentence context. I do like the idea of using it for maybe some very basic terms in psuedocode though (if, for, define, class, etc)

perhaps an alphabetic shorthand like keyscript?

Did you not learn cursive in grade school? This looks exceptionally readable to me, and other than the capital letters it doesn't really have any flourishes.

And given how practiced his hand looks, I wouldn't be surprised if he was able to write this much quicker in cursive than I could write it in printed letters.

I learned cursive in grade school (xennial represent) but neither I nor my classmates wrote like this. This is some Declaration of Independence shit right here.

I learned cursive too, but it's still much slower to read than plain old 'normal' lettering. I assume the author would be able to read it just fine. It is gorgeous though.

Same here. :c It's a dead language.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com