When it first came out there was no other way for budding artists to try their hand at fonts without investing a fortune in software. Many font designers still use it. A really easy to use tool by Data Becker called your handwriting will turn scanned images of your handwriting into a font. Their low-end product is called Type Tool with includes a plethora of automated features. The automated features allow novice fontmakers to make fonts without investing a lot of time.
Demos are available for each package.
There's Macromedia Fontographer too. Personally I use FontLab, but I think it's too complicated for beginners. If I were just entering the world of type design, I'd use TypeTool . If you're a Fontographer user, have a look anyway and you'll see how easy making fonts can be if you have the right software. Name your font in 'font info'.