[OpenFontLibrary] Recent non-font content on OFLB

[Barry Schwartz]

Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org> skribis:
> Well, things are changing now with the advent of LuaTeX, thanks to its
> backward compatibility, it is taking slowly over TeX world (see ConTeXt
> for example, which is being rewritten in Lua), unlike ANT which never
> gained momentum.

ANT, written almost entirely by one guy in an actual programming
language, never gained momentum because people have had their minds
numbed by TeX and glorified assembly languages. We have had issue
after issue after issue of TUGboat, year after year, devoted to newer
and more intricate ways to drive a nail with a sponge. The appeal is
understandable; give me a chance to write in an assembly language,
when I was still capable of such things, and I could get lost in
it. Even fontforge is written in a mere glorified assembly language
that is the main reason the program crashes, crashes, crashes, because
the compiler is happy to compile stupid things that an OCaml compiler
would never come close to accepting and which no one should have to
worry about in 2010 in an application.

This is all kind of off-topic, but it is too easy to get sucked into
bit twiddling. Bit twiddling is a curse on mankind. OFLB can have all
kinds of bells and whistles, but some graphic design and an effort to
appeal to actual, non-TeXie font-users have made League of Moveable
Type a more productive place to post fonts, from my point of view
wherein, frankly, TeXies can be taken for granted. They'll use
anything capable of doing text, even if it is buried under three
layers of tarballing in an ftp directory on an obscure host.

:)