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posted by Fnord666 on Monday July 24 2017, @03:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-no-but-... dept.

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


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Monday July 24 2017, @11:55AM (2 children)

    by looorg (578) on Monday July 24 2017, @11:55AM (#543638)

    Sweet Zombie Jesus that looks horrible. I must be living in my own little protected programming bubble cause I didn't even know this was a thing. I'd never enable or use that. If I type == I expect that and not for it to turn into some giant line segment, there should be a little space between them and all things I type. I know it's turning them into the "proper" looking symbols such as != becoming an equal-sign with a slash thru but I think I'm just to used to it being the old way, so used in fact that I even write it that way if I write code or annotations by hand on paper.

    Fira Mono looks fine while Fira Code looks like some kind of atrocity. With that said I found it equally disturbing that they are using fonts that are sans-serif for programming in the Hanselman examples.

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  • (Score: 2) by stormreaver on Monday July 24 2017, @01:20PM (1 child)

    by stormreaver (5101) on Monday July 24 2017, @01:20PM (#543662)

    Sweet Zombie Jesus that looks horrible. I must be living in my own little protected programming bubble cause I didn't even know this was a thing.

    You're not alone, on both counts. Trying to read that screen vomit made my head hurt, and I didn't know there were people crazy enough to think ligatures in programming were anything other than a drunken sickness.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @02:00PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @02:00PM (#543683)

      It's the natural mutated form of MS proportional fonts. Kill Bill.