Posted by zdw 4 days ago
Note: there are repeat glyphs here like c and o, though the example actually uses a different c somehow. But perhaps repeats are ok given context.
At first, it seemed like an Easter egg, but it's probably just a natural happenstance of two people centuries apart deciding to represent the first ten letters of the alphabet in a 2x2 grid with a general idea to use fewer dots at the start than at the end.
I could almost fit an entire 80x40 terminal on my watch face!
The glyph coverage is enough for most programming languages; missing glyphs just fall back to a pixelized look.
Lode 1.5x works really well at 110 ppi displays, which seems to be the uncanny valley for antialiasing.
In theory (focusing on non colourblind english speakers) there could be say 8 distinct colours and 8 shapes giving 64 chars.
https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/dotsies.htm (original site https://www.dotsies.org, which has a casual introduction text that slowly transitions into dots; however, it was unavailable at the time of writing.)
However I don't think even native developers with full Unicode language support tend to use Japanese/Chinese characters in variable names or keywords. There is the occasional hybrid registry key such as "令和_令_Reiwa_R" (which will allow the temporary replacement of the name of the Emperor in Windows dates when the current one dies).