Yeah because normal people never have to deal with alphanumeric strings...
Natural language tends to have a high degree of disambiguating redundancy and is used to communicate between humans, who are good at making use of that. Programming languages have somewhat less of disambiguating redundancy (or in extreme cases almost none), and, most critically, are used to communicate with compilers and interpreters that have zero capacity to make use of it even when it is present.
This makes "letter looks like a digit that would rarely be used in a place where both make sense" a lot more of a problem for a font used with a programming language than a font used for a natural language.
El confusion is absolutely a problem for regular people.
I said alphanumeric strings not natural language. Things like order codes, authentication codes, license numbers, etc.
Not that official State Department communication is mostly “legal language” as distinct from more general formal use of natural language to start with.
Why design an intentionally ambiguous font? There is only downside to it.
And people like it this way! So that's why we design fonts like this.
Oh really? People have a mechanism for reporting that? And they'll turn away from products using fonts with properly-demarcated capitals?
Ladies and gentlemen, witness the "argumentum ad populum" fallacy.
