!= is two bloody characters not one.
And now people are doing it for 3 characters.
With this kind of thing, you get all the text editing idiocy of combining characters (like emojis) for no benefit at all.
See: Text Editing Hates You Too https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/
Jetbrains, VSCode people, whomever: edit mode and presentation view. There are times when I think for a lot of people the traditional math style makes sense for reading, but when it comes to editing, it bothers the hell out of me too.
Unfortunately that's not true.
The problem shows itself when looking at codeblocks that developers share (in docs, blogs, videos, etc...)
Ligatures become a readability problem.
In addition to ligatures, you get IMO a better version of the "Mix & Match" idea: doc comments are rendered as normal proportional text.
> Here’s a concrete example of the mess that it is: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSgIEDMekSg&t=157>. He says, “so we can write an if statement, so we can say ‘if want is not equal to got’”, with the character `!` briefly visible on screen, then a ≠. Fortunately he was aware enough to put text over the video “I’m using the ‘Fira Code’ font, which shows ‘!=’ in this neat way. Try it!”, so the beginner (since this is designed for beginners) at least gets some hint—but I bet that more than a few will forget and find it difficult to figure out what it is again, and anyone that’s skimming may just miss that part altogether.
In education material in particular, coding ligatures are emphatically not OK. How on earth is the user supposed to figure out that that wide ≠ is actually typed !=? So you’re putting a stumbling-block in their path.
> Fortunately he was aware enough to put text over the video “I’m using the ‘Fira Code’ font, which shows ‘!=’ in this neat way. Try it!”
It's not a difficult concept. Nobody gets confused if :) is displayed as an emoji.
—⁂—
Fun fact: the King James Version of the Bible uses “:)” 37 times (e.g. Matthew 24:15) and “;)” 53 times (e.g. Deuteronomy 4:31).
I’ve had auto-emojification of character sequences like :) cause problems on more than one occasion, e.g. in things like copying logs and getting them mangled. I strongly oppose those sorts of transformations being applied willy-nilly. Converting :) into U+1F642 or similar at authoring time is OK, so long as I can turn it off, but doing it blindly causes enough problems and helps little enough that it just shouldn’t be done any more, not when most devices have ready access to actual emoji input.
Another way to fix the inconsistency is for the language designers to get unstuck from the past and allow literal ≠ in code