SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Ligatures in programming fonts — a misguided trend I was hoping would collapse under its own illogic. But several readers have already sent me this new argument in favor.
Let me save you some time:
Ligatures in programming fonts are a terrible idea.
And not because I’m a purist or a grump. (Some days, but not today.) Programming code has special semantic considerations. Ligatures in programming fonts are likely to either misrepresent the meaning of the code, or cause miscues among readers. So in the end, even if they’re cute, the risk of error isn’t worth it.
There are good reasons we have Unicode and this is NOT one of them.
Source: http://tinyletter.com/mbutterick/letters/q-ligatures-in-programming-fonts-a-hell-no
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @04:40AM (1 child)
You should really use that with proportional fonts and python language.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday July 24 2017, @02:19PM
One simple rule lets an editor draw 4-space indentation (as is traditional for Python and Java) sanely in a proportional font: Draw line-initial space characters the same width as the characters immediately above them. This way, a 4-space indentation below for or def or while is as wide as "for " or "def " or "whil" in that font. As an exercise, try this rule with the examples in PEP 8 [python.org] and let me know what breaks. I anticipate that this rule will mishandle very little apart from multiline strings introduced with triple quotation marks.