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Comment by tincholio | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Which script would be best, in your opinion?

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?

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

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!)

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