Programmer Humor

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got him (lemy.lol)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (6 children)

I mean, I certainly wouldn't give someone else shit for using ligatures, but personally, I don't like them, because:

they break with monospacedness. Everything is in a nice grid and you've randomly got these character combinations that needlessly stick out.
they sometimes happen in places where they really shouldn't.
they hide what the actual characters are. Especially, if go to edit that code, my brain will really struggle for a split-second when there's a '≠', then I delete one character and rather than the whole thing disappearing, I'm left with a '!'.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Do you also get surprised when you backspace a tab and suddenly it removes more whitespace than 1 characters worth?

Or did you learn it fast and really never think about it?

I think it's more a "getting used to" thing, that once learned, you don't think about, but it makes things more readable.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Sure, I could get used to it. But it being more readable is not even true for me, because the thing I got used to instead, is that != is the unequals-operator. I see that much more often than ≠.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Studies show that ligatures improve readability, but I acknowledge that it's likely untrue for outliers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

For monospace fonts? I've heard of such research for proportional fonts, where ligatures definitely make sense to me. But yeah, I wouldn't assume such research to automatically translate to monospace.

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