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Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

> The characters we use to interact with our computers were mostly designed to be hand-written and minimize the amount of movement your hand has to make going from one letter to the next.

That is an interesting theory. Do you remember a source for it?

Taking that idea to an extreme (and not suggesting the theory requires such an extreme), imagine optimizing characters only for that specification. I imagine much more prominence for simple, single, mostly horizontal lines, moving left-right and ending rightward.

  / \ - ~ _ , . ` ' ^ n u v w m 2 z ...

The punctuation performs much better. You could imagine 'dot on bottom', 'dot in middle', 'dot on top', 'two dots on bottom' ... 'line on bottom' ... 'tilde on bottom' ... 'slash top to bottom', 'slash middle to bottom' ... etc.

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That's one way to do it but it helps to think in terms of cursive, or people's sloppy handwriting where the letters are often connected by at least one stroke so that the tip of the pen doesn't need to be lifted from the paper.

There are also multiple ways to write a given character. For example, some people put a line through the number 7 for easier readability, and so it isn't confused with 1. Something similar can be done with 0 so it isn't mistaken for a 6 or capital O.

The real interesting characters are ones like number 4, where it can be square or triangular. However, to write the square version quickly you have to lift the pen. To write the triangular version you only need to put the pen to paper once.

These are just some common examples I see in use day to day. I'm sure there are many more optimizations being employed, especially in languages other than English where the characters can be much more complex.

Designing a set of glyphs for an alphabet is a multidimensional optimization problem:

- economical for writing - minimize changes in direction, minimizing movement, etc.

- clarity between glyphs (0 vs. O, + vs ×)

- robust to noise, 3rd graders and doctors

- insensitive to medium (pencil/paper, stick/clay, brush/papyrus)

- legible at small sizes, low contrast, noise in the display (coffee stains, inkjet cartridge low, etc.)

- context - if two glyphs rarely co-occur, it's okay if they look similar (0 and O, I and 1)

I wonder how the modern English alphabet was developed. I assume it evolved, but perhaps it is partly or largely the product a few influential design decisions.

Also, while I agree those are important measures of performance, I wonder how much the development of the alphabet was influenced by them.

> economical for writing

Another interesting thought experiment would be designing an alphabet for typing, that ignored writing optimization.

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