The most unusual characteristic of Computer Modern, however, is the fact that it is a complete type family designed with Knuth's Metafont system, one of the few typefaces developed in this way. The Computer Modern source files are governed by 62 distinct parameters, controlling the widths and heights of various elements, the presence of serifs or old-style numerals, whether dots such as the dot on the "i" are square or rounded, and the degree of "superness" in the bowls of lowercase letters such as "g" and "o". This allows Metafont designs to be processed in unusual ways; Knuth has shown effects such as morphing in demonstrations, where one font slowly transitions into another over the course of a text. While it attracted attention for the concept, Metafont has been used by few other font designers; by 1996 Knuth commented "asking an artist to become enough of a mathematician to understand how to write a font with 60 parameters is too much" while digital-period font designer Jonathan Hoefler commented in 2015 that "Knuth's idea that letters start with skeletal forms is flawed".
Yes -- I think Knuth's work is a great first draft of this.
In my mind, however, the concept is less about providing parameter values (like Computer Modern), but more about actually drawing the parts. In other words it's less about variable/multiple masters, but "here's what the end of a vertical serif looks like at this weight", "here's what a full vertical stem looks like". (Though if you're extrapolating from Latin to Arabic where virtually nothing is in common, then it might be closer to a multiple masters situation.)
Maybe it's too hard to do, I can't be sure. But I've also seen deep neural-network-generated fonts posted here that have intrigued me... and even if it's too hard to simply "assemble" fonts from pieces and get a good result, I can't help but wonder if deep learning applied to 10,000's of typefaces couldn't be a tool in making that happen effectively.
The most unusual characteristic of Computer Modern, however, is the fact that it is a complete type family designed with Knuth's Metafont system, one of the few typefaces developed in this way. The Computer Modern source files are governed by 62 distinct parameters, controlling the widths and heights of various elements, the presence of serifs or old-style numerals, whether dots such as the dot on the "i" are square or rounded, and the degree of "superness" in the bowls of lowercase letters such as "g" and "o". This allows Metafont designs to be processed in unusual ways; Knuth has shown effects such as morphing in demonstrations, where one font slowly transitions into another over the course of a text. While it attracted attention for the concept, Metafont has been used by few other font designers; by 1996 Knuth commented "asking an artist to become enough of a mathematician to understand how to write a font with 60 parameters is too much" while digital-period font designer Jonathan Hoefler commented in 2015 that "Knuth's idea that letters start with skeletal forms is flawed".
For a small sample of font source code, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont
Edit: for an idea about what variants can be generated, see https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/16.1/....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_master_fonts and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_fonts are younger, but also don’t quite work. It’s very hard/not really possible to design parametrized fonts that look well across wide parameter ranges.