I weep at the beauty of old keywords for APL or ALGOL programming with all of these useful symbols for programming. Now everyone says “I cAn’T tYpE aN aRrOw On My KeyBoArD” when I use Unicode in the languages that support it… buddy, you used to be able to & I have news for you when it comes to the symbols you think every keyboard has just because you are used to ASCII.
Ironically these are often the same folks abusing ligatures in their text editors.
Rant: there are so many false positives, & every time there is pair programming over video (I don’t know why you would do this for text) or some smug presentation where the presenter thought it was a good idea, there is always confusion in the audience about what this is all supposed to mean. If you like ‘fancy symbols’, then use fancy symbols & make sure your language adopts Unicode support (great for non-Western folk accessibility too!). Do you write (with a pencil) an != or <= instead of ≠ or ≤? No one means dash, greater than, they mean → so why not say exactly what you mean with RIGHTWARDS ARROW? In 2024, the input problems are solved in a myriad of ways (Compose key, keyboard layers, autocorrects, digraph supports in text editors, character pickers like Kitty, & so on) that it’s just not a good argument… else you are arguing against punctuation just like the OP. Hell, I saw this week somebody trying to create their own lightweight markup syntax with less symbols saying Markdown, as flawed as that language is, is too hard to type on a phone. Like what are we doing? Especially when virtual keyboards make it trivial to add an infinite amount of character key combinations without the burden of physical keyboard limitations (even if the tactility is obviously missing)…
I weep at the beauty of old keywords for APL or ALGOL programming with all of these useful symbols for programming. Now everyone says “I cAn’T tYpE aN aRrOw On My KeyBoArD” when I use Unicode in the languages that support it… buddy, you used to be able to & I have news for you when it comes to the symbols you think every keyboard has just because you are used to ASCII.
Ironically these are often the same folks abusing ligatures in their text editors.
It pains me to see ligatures in code.
Rant: there are so many false positives, & every time there is pair programming over video (I don’t know why you would do this for text) or some smug presentation where the presenter thought it was a good idea, there is always confusion in the audience about what this is all supposed to mean. If you like ‘fancy symbols’, then use fancy symbols & make sure your language adopts Unicode support (great for non-Western folk accessibility too!). Do you write (with a pencil) an
!=or<=instead of≠or≤? No one means dash, greater than, they mean→so why not say exactly what you mean withRIGHTWARDS ARROW? In 2024, the input problems are solved in a myriad of ways (Compose key, keyboard layers, autocorrects, digraph supports in text editors, character pickers like Kitty, & so on) that it’s just not a good argument… else you are arguing against punctuation just like the OP. Hell, I saw this week somebody trying to create their own lightweight markup syntax with less symbols saying Markdown, as flawed as that language is, is too hard to type on a phone. Like what are we doing? Especially when virtual keyboards make it trivial to add an infinite amount of character key combinations without the burden of physical keyboard limitations (even if the tactility is obviously missing)…