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Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures

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Re: Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures

#241

Post by InstanceOf »

SwellJoe wrote: post #226
dragonwriter wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a language supports unicode, why not support ≠ for not-equals instead of "!="? Perl 6 tends to support both multicharacter ASCII operators and single-character Unicode equivalents.

I love the way Perl 6 looks with Unicode, it's really beautiful, but I'm just not very comfortable typing Unicode. It takes me a split second to type ">>* I think doing it with the font might actually be nicer from a usability perspective. Unicode is fun to play with but slows me way down.

Someone should make an optional IDE plugin or setting to convert them.

Re: Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures

#242

Post by SwellJoe »

InstanceOf wrote: post #241
SwellJoe wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the way Perl 6 looks with Unicode, it's really beautiful, but I'm just not very comfortable typing Unicode. It takes me a split second to type ">>* I think doing it with the font might actually be nicer from a usability perspective. Unicode is fun to play with but slows me way down.

Someone should make an optional IDE plugin or setting to convert them.

perltidy for Perl 6, perhaps, should offer it as an option. It'd only show up after you saved your code (or checked it in, or built it...I usually run perltidy on my Perl 5 code in my dist.ini, so it only happens during a dzil build).

One of the golang plugin bundles for Atom runs gofmt on every file on save which is actually pretty neat. I've been tempted to do the same for all of the languages I use. It sort of habituates me to do the right thing over time, as I see the changes happen immediately and I'm always working with a file that is mostly in the "right" style.

Re: Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures

#243

Post by sixothree »

Stratoscope wrote: post #151
sixothree wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would probably want to hit you with a baseball bat if I had to spend any time reading your code with my monospaced font. At least for the type of code that I work in that lends itself to code alignment.

> I would probably want to hit you with a baseball bat if I had to spend any time reading your code with my monospaced font. Well, that's a good way to get a head start on the "hell or purgatory" thing, isn't it! :-) I'm not saying every kind of code is suited for a proportional font. If you use ASCII art, or if you are writing out two-dimensional matrices or the like, a monospaced font will serve you better. The kin…

Ok. So do you use tabs or spaces? Do any reasonable editors support tabs of this sort?

Re: Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures

#244

Post by arantius »

problems wrote: post #164
Avshalom wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nah, it's a bad habit. It means constant readjustment and unnecessarily bloated diffs every time you change a function or variable name. or the lovely foo := a; bar := b; then a day later foo := a; bar := b; foobar := cd; which also points to the problem that it lends itself to premature constant readjustment because a day later you have to move every thing again because as it turns out you really needed foobarlist a…

One interesting talk I watched recently: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/2013/The-Care-a... In it, they make a really good argument that humans simply shouldn't be doing this type of formatting work. Let the computers do it, clang-format can get it right every time in a fraction of the time a human can. Pick whatever style you want, let the computers deal with it. I quite like this, now I just write a bi…

I've seen plenty of suboptimal code in review, commented about what I consider a better/more readable version to be, and gotten the response "this is what the clang formatter produces". Boo to automatic formatting. It produces the worst lowest-common-denomninator version of code.

Re: Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures

#245

Post by jcranberry »

Stratoscope wrote: post #219
jcranberry wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Block selection and anything having to do with IO formatting are very good reasons why monospaced fonts are still useful. That being said the idea that a programmer being resistant to changing their font style is indicative of general intellectual laziness is one of the most laughable things I've ever heard. I'd be more convinced if someone told me that refusing to change syntax highlighting themes implied you're a b…

> ...the idea that a programmer being resistant to changing their font style is indicative of general intellectual laziness is one of the most laughable things I've ever heard. Let me just mention that this isn't what I said at all. I don't blame you for misunderstanding, I must not have explained my thoughts clearly. I didn't say anything about intellectual "laziness", and I certainly didn't mean that someone who di…

Ironically, I'd disagree and say that your CEO was being intellectually lazy by explaining your preference for proportional font by the absurd declaration that anyone who does it is simply sophomoric or inexplicable.

However, I would not take this kind of instance of intellectual laziness to be indicative of a more general complacency when it comes to ideas, tools, or self-development more generally.

By contrast I think intellectual curiosity is a great thing when present and lamentable when not, but I don't think it's a prerequisite to be a good professional in almost any field, including programming related ones.

Re: Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures

#246

Post by Wintamute »

SippinLean wrote: post #31
Wintamute wrote: post #4

I'm mystified how any one finds these more readable. Form over function if you ask me.

Really? Why is seeing a "less than or equal to" symbol legible in a textbook, but not a text editor?

Reading a textbook is not the same activity as editing code instructions for a computer character-by-character.
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