https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...
As #9 on the leaderboard I feel like I need to defend myself.
compose - -
and it makes an em dash, it takes a quarter of a second longer to produce this.
I don't know why the compose key isn't used more often.
You can tell if I'm using mac or not for specific comment by the presence of em dash.
Make sure terminal detection is turned off, and, for god’s sake, don’t honor the NO_COLOR environment variable.
Otherwise, people will be able to run your stuff in production and read the logs.
While rockets and hearts seem more like unnecessary abuse, there are a few icons that really make sense in CLI and TUI programs, but now I'm hesitant to use them as then people who don't know me get suspicious it could be AI slop.
Sane languages have much less of this problem but the damage was done by the cargo cultists.
Much like how curly braces in C are placed because back in the day you needed you punch card deck to be editable, but we got stuck with it even after we stared using screens.
Can you expand on this? What do curly braces have anything to do with punch card decks being editable? What do screens?
By putting the final curly brace on it's own card, and hence line, it meant you could add lines to blocks without having to change the old last line.
E.g. the following code meant you only had to type a new card and insert it.
for(i=0;i<10;i++){ /* Card 1 */
printf("%d ", i); /* Card 2 */
} /* Card 3 */
for(i=0;i<10;i++){ /* Card 1 */
printf("%d ", i); /* Card 2 */
printf("%d\n", i*i); /* Card 3 */
} /* Card 4 */
for(i=0;i<10;i++){ /* Card 1 */
printf("%d ", i);} /* Card 2 */
for(i=0;i<10;i++){ /* Card 1 */
printf("%d ", i); /* Card 2' */
printf("%d\n", i*i);} /* Card 3 */
I believe it was a technical documentation and the author wanted to create visual associations with acteurs in the given example. Like clock for async process of ordering, (food -) order, Burger etc.
I don't remember if I commented on the issue myself, but I do remember that it reduced readability a lot - at least for me.