When comparing Adobe Source Code Pro vs Hack, the Slant community recommends Adobe Source Code Pro for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Adobe Source Code Pro is ranked 2nd while Hack is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose Adobe Source Code Pro is:
The characters in Source Code Pro are easily readable. They have consistent widths across all weights as to not break up words. Commonly used programming symbols (such as various kinds of brackets) are made easily discernible from each other while various punctuation marks are made bigger than normal. This makes them especially good for programmers who keep staring at code for hours.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Easy on user's eyes
The characters in Source Code Pro are easily readable. They have consistent widths across all weights as to not break up words. Commonly used programming symbols (such as various kinds of brackets) are made easily discernible from each other while various punctuation marks are made bigger than normal. This makes them especially good for programmers who keep staring at code for hours.
Pro Legible on all displays
The characters have been made in such a way that they are easily discernible and usable regardless of font size, weight, and display.
Pro Free and open source
The font is licensed under SIL open font license with source code available on GitHub. Being an open source font, it's also reasonable to expect incremental upgrades and additions to character sets and functionality.
Pro Even spacing
Characters are evenly spaced, making for better readability.
Pro Great in print
The font works particularly well when it is in print.
Pro Several styles available
The code comes with seven style variants: ExtraLight, Light, Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold, and Black.
Pro Offers italics
The beta release version of Source Code Pro introduced italicized characters on Jul 18, 2015.
Pro Available with Google Web Fonts
The font is hosted on Google Web Fonts directory, meaning that it can be easily embedded in web pages.
Pro Powerline symbols included
Powerline symbols are useful for programmers to display a nicer status bar or mode-line on Vim and Emacs.
Pro Version with ligature support for Haskell is available
A version of Source Code Pro with support for common Haskell composite glyphs such as >>= is available here. An editor with ligature support, such as Leksah, is required.
Pro Light and Extra Light weights available
The Light and Extra Light weights make the font less "bold" looking when reading.
Pro Very readable
Pro Libre webfonts are available in svg, eot, ttf, woff, and woff2 formats
Hack is free for unlimited commercial and non-commercial use. The webfonts are hinted (TrueType instruction set) to optimize display on the screen and are built into all commonly used web font formats with each new release. They include the complete release character set and smaller (filesize) basic Latin subset releases. They are available in the build directory of the repository.
Pro Fixes many readability issues in Vera/DejaVu
The tilde symbol ('~'), comma (',') and semicolon (';') glyphs have been modified to be more readable at small sizes and/or on non-HD displays. In addition, the underscore symbol ('_') has been slightly lifted for alignment with surrounding characters.
Pro Avaliable in many GNU/Linux distro package manager
Including Debian/Ubuntu (fonts-hack), Fedora (font-hack-ttf), OpenSUSE (hack-fonts), Arch (ttf-hack) and probably many more. Much nicer than having to manually install/update
Pro Free/Open license
Pro Renders accurately on Windows on all font sizes
Pro Based on the tried and tested Bitstream Vera Sans Mono
The fonts are in the Vera Sans Mono lineage with a significant expansion of the character set (which includes Cyrillic and modern Greek character sets), new glyph shapes and modifications of the original glyph shapes, as well as improvements in metrics and hinting/TT instructions to make it more legible at small text sizes used for source code.
The changelog is available here.
Pro Powerline glyph patch is included
The regular set is patched with Powerline glyphs by default. There is no need to patch the font to use it in Powerline environments.
Pro Source code is released in UFO format
UFO source format is widely supported by all modern font editors if you would like to modify the typeface.
Cons
Con Dotted zero lacks clarity
Dotted zero characters are less distinct from capital "O" characters than slashed zero characters.
Con Very difficult to read compared to Consolas or Courier New
The characters are much too widely spaced apart to be easily readable.
Con Excessive line spacing
The lines are spaced too far apart.
Con Ligatures missing but you can try Hasklig font if you want ligature
Con Can be somewhat odd for hex numbers with certain styles
With certain font-size and font-weight combinations (12 pt and regular, for example) capital letters are bigger than integer digits, making hex numbers look weird.
Con Incomplete Unicode support
This font is missing many unicode characters used to "beautify" various terminal apps. Also missing are programming ligatures used in some languages.
Con No ligatures in the default font
Although patched versions with ligatures do exist - see here.
Con Sometimes difficult to distinguish lowercase "i" (eye) and lowercase "l" (ell)
When using a higher resolution monitor and a smaller font size, the lowercase "i" (eye) and lowercase "l" (ell) are very difficult to distinguish. The space between the dot and the remainder of the letter seems to somehow disappear, thereby making it look like a solid line, similar to the lowercase "l" (ell).
Con Too similar to DejaVu
See this gif comparison between the two fonts.