Ligatures in programming fonts: hell no (2019)

The rest are terrible. Especially if you don't have a math background. If you come from coding, the symbols are meaningless new inventions. To me, >= IS exactly the right symbol. It's the one I learned, the one I actually encounter in daily life, anything else looks like a math paper, not code.

Even emoji aren't the best if you didn't type them explicitly. :) is mostly similar to although not exactly the same, but :P is definitely nothing like any of .

Edit: apparently emoji don't work here again? I thought they added them?

I've been using programming fonts with ligatures for years. I had wasted several hours because of those stupid bugs when I mixed up O and 0, - and _, but ligatures never caused me any problem. It is obvious when they are there, and you rarely see non-ascii characters when programming (unless you are writing Lean).

Yes. On my computer. In my editor. That I am using…because I like ligatures, because they make my code easier to read. For me.

Use of ligatures on my setup does not force anyone else to use them? They’re not “viral” like a language feature.

“Oh but what if the >= Unicode symbol ends up in your source code and you don’t notice because you’re using ligatures?”

Is this the most contrived issue ever? Yeah and what if someone runs “find and replace” using Unicode confusables on my codebase? That’s arguably worse and requires no special font features. Plus I suspect most programming languages would throw an error immediately if you used the >= symbol instead of the pair.

If you don’t like ligatures, that’s fine, but there are those of us that do, and our font preference isn’t a threat to you.