Comment by returningfory2
1 hour ago
Thanks for this great comment!
The motivation behind METAFONT is amusing to me because it seems to have some of the same hubris of the most extreme AI proponents nowadays: we can replace art by technology. I'm fascinated with TeX (and have spent a lot of my life rewriting it http://github.com/jamespfennell/texcraft) but I always found the situation with fonts in the TeX ecosystem a bit odd. There are people in our society whose vocation is font design (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Slimbach). But the TeX ecosystem landed in a place where we use fonts created by computer scientists rather than font designers.
The idea wasn't to replace type designers, but to create a new tool for artists to use.
I had a slightly different reaction, though I'm only going by what I read in this thread. It wasn't to replace art with technology for everyone, but to scratch a personal itch. He liked the artist-made typography just fine, but it was going away regardless and that was demotivating to him. I think this is in the finest tradition of hacks, even if it took decades.
The first METAFONT was Computer Modern, which (short version) was a re-creation of Monotype 8A.