Software engineers normally find monospace fonts (e.g. Courier) to be superior to other fonts for development. We do this for a number of reasons, but I'll give a few:

• Spacing other than simple nesting is consistent (e.g. in a continuation line)
• All characters in mono-space fonts are clear, and easy to distinguish
• Equal-length strings look the same length
• Comments can contain ASCII art

For these and other reasons, almost every software developer uses a monospace font with which to write their code.

Occasionally we leave our isolated world of monospace characters, and find ourselves in the land of variable-width fonts. No, I am not referring to the outside world - I am referring to our chat clients, and to a lesser extent other forms of online communication. Most of these applications (Pidgin, AIM, Yahoo IM, MSN Messenger, web chat clients, etc.) seem to completely neglect the need for software engineers to show our creations to the rest of the world. Whenever we paste our block of code into one of these applications, it comes out looking like vomit. To add insult to injury, they often turn our syntax into animated faces. It is even difficult to communicate about single code objects like foo and bar, so we end up using ambiguous workarounds like wrapping them in quotes. Is "foo" a string now that it is wrapped in quotes?

Ironically, all of these chat applications were built by software engineers. Somehow, at least in this sense, they never conceived that any of their users could be software engineers like themselves. Or perhaps they could not convince upper management.

The solution: Monospace formatting.

Why is monospace a property of a font, instead of being a font style? We have bold, italic, and underscore. And sometimes even strikethrough. Why do we have strikethrough? Lawyers need it for all the legal documents they send to each other? Why did lawyers trump software engineers on the stuff that software engineers made? I say it's pretty unfair. Let us have monospace! Right next to the b, i, u in our editors, there should be a little m. Let ctrl-m switch it on and off. It should be in every chat program, and let it disable smileys when it's being used. I promise to switch to the first chat program that does this.