Via this entry in Joe Grossberg‘s blog, I came across a couple of pages that link to and compare monospace fonts. Programmers spend a lot of time looking at text monospaced text, thus the choice of good font will probably increase the productivity. Apart from the usual requirements of sharp letters and multiple encodings, good differentiation between “o” (lowercase “o”), “O” (uppercase “o”), and “0” (zero) as well as “i” (lowercase “i”), “I” (uppercase “i”), “l” (lowercase “l”), and 1 (one) are greatly appreciated.
These pages are here and here.