ANNs have been inspired by biological processes, but in practice you have to squint very tightly to see the similarity. Biological neurons are multiple orders of magnitude more connected than the nodes in an ANN, plastic in terms of their connectedness and continuously learning, and their activations are also affected in complex ways by the levels of various transmitter molecules in the brain.

Of course it's nowhere near a guarantee that it would land in the stable language, but it's still an opportunity to try it in practice.

Later on with the Internet biting into the cover disk magazines, they started to steadily fall towards the lowest common denominator and shift to the gamer lad segment. But I wouldn't have had as much fun with computers if it wasn't for a subscription back in the day. Thanks for the reminder.

And especially having performant and actively maintained default choices built in. With C, as described in the post you responded to, you'll typically end up building a personal collection of dusty old libraries that work well enough for most of the time.

It's a classic tragedy of engineering; you can actually ship with almost anything, and just successfully delivering a product reinforces a feeling that your choices were good, no matter how arbitrary they were in practice.

People can get really confident that what they're doing is tried and true, while it's simply the only approach they've had for all of their career.

Usually when people complain about this, the comparison is to Windows, which prefers strong hinting, i.e. snapping the font shapes to within (sub)pixel boundaries.

There also used to be patent encumbrance issues around subpixel rendering, making Linux font rendering on TFTs overall worse by default, but as of 2019 those have expired. Some distributions had already enabled those features anyway.