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Comment by jgw | Hacker News Reader

It makes me a bit of a luddite (and a heck of a curmudgeon), but it always makes me a little sad when good ol' ASCII smileys are rendered all fancy-like. There's something charming and hackerish about showing it as a 7-bit glyph.

I think the Internet fundamentally changed when that happened.

Tangentially-related, I can't fathom why someone would post YouTube videos of `telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl`.

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My biggest problem with this is when the images auto-replacing your text emotes convey a completely different expression, and you have no control over it.

Skype is the worst offender, where for example the ":3" cat-face gets replaced by an image of a whole cat, without a face at all. If you disable this "feature" in your options, it's only disabled on YOUR end. The receiving client will still convert your text into images, so now you have NO clue at all how the receiving party interprets your expressions.

Telegram does this RIGHT, where the conversion is done BEFORE your message is sent. If you disable it on your end, the receiver will only receive the text you intended.

Try sending a code snippet in any modern chat

Telegram is pretty good with that. One ` for inline code, three for blocks of code.

Actually Skype is great with code.: just prefix your message with "!! ", or surround it with triple backticks, and it will treat it as code.

Triple backticks also works in WhatsApp.

The worst is if you are trying to do a letter-indexed list of items and B) gets coverted to a guy with sunglasses.

For those that might not get the reference: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=...

Emojis are stunningly ugly to me, though I did appreciate throwing out the custom doge and Doom space marine ones at random when my team used Slack.

I find that they're often too cutesy or overstated. In Whatsapp for example, they come across as incredibly flirtatious.

The winking smile should be jokey but I can only interpret it as flirty nowadays ;)

I use the winking with tongue sticking out to mean a joke... but I don't know if everyone else interprets it that way ;) (that was a flirty wink)

Since I alternate between the smile and winking smile about evenly, you're making me reconsider my past text conversations. ;)

I think it's a cultural thing - or more precisely, a non-culture-specific thing, which should be as unoffensive as possible.

Honestly, I don't envy those that design and publish emojis, it's a cultural minefield. :-) has no color, gender, outfit or what-have-you. There's been a lot of debate about the skin tone of e.g. the thumbs up emoji (which now comes in half a dozen colors if the relatively ambiguous / non-human yellow isn't to your needs), the gender of emojis depicting jobs, and the color of outfits of emojis depicting jobs.

The smiley is an efficient general-purpose abstraction of reality; the emoji is a million instances of copy-pasted overly-specific code.

Emojis are in Unicode. They aren't parsed or converted to multiple glyphs anymore, the text editor will provide them directly.

http://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html

I was doubtful of emojis at first, but now I'm loving the concept. They really help me communicate emotions that I wouldn't put into actual words. Smileys can't really do that.

Culturally I see it as a the first universal (limited) language, using standardized ideograms. Maybe in a few decades we can express full sentences and we will have a written language for all Humans to use. 21st century hieroglyphs.

There have been attempts a universal language that are quite fascinating. There's an interesting RadioLab on the subject of Bissymbols. I suppose the one that sticks and evolves over time is the one that probably matters though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols http://www.radiolab.org/story/257194-man-became-bliss/

Maxor~ ellioid; s~h~ush UPCOM, shud shout aout aout. Ellioté brooghund brooghund.

See for example the translation of moby dick into emoji as a prototype of emoji as language

As a college student, I use emoji constantly to communicate all sorts of abstract sentiments, but in my experience they can also be irritatingly ambiguous and highly dependent on cultural norms and interpretation.

Take the thumbs up emoji - within my social circles, the exact same emoji can be interpreted both as a enthusiastic agreement ("Sure!") and also as a sarcastic affirmation ("Good for you.").

It's often difficult to infer the intended meaning, even with context, and in some circumstances I've found emojis have actually added significantly to the ambiguity and cognitive burden in parsing a text. That's not a problem I have often faced with simple smileys.

We need an emoji to represent sarcasm that we would put at the end of the message, like the use of "/s". And I think this would count as grammar.

Kyle McLaughlan explains a former project: https://ello.co/codenamesarah/post/s9dx9cx_iw6ytktbugjwmq

Emauj'ib

I'm with you. I put a space between the : and the ) to prevent the graphic emoji : )

Going the other way often works too! (:

Which looks like a bald person without a mouth to me :-)

Somehow I've become accustomed to 'read' emoji as tilting your head to the left. Turning the emoji around always reminds me of German books, which often have the title upside down on the book spine compared to English / Dutch books.

Pasting bash snippets into chat is so frustrating when clients try to render emojis :/

Fortran also suffers from this problem:

real, intent(in) :: f(:,:,:)

That automatic emoji concept can be quite annoying sometimes.

For instance, Outlook 365 will automatically turn "B)" into the "smiling face with sunglasses" emoji. I cannot fathom this use case. Apparently someone at Microsoft thought that things like, oh, a fairly common styling of a simple lettered list (A) Do this B) Do that C) Etc.) and parenthesized words / sentences ending in capital B (abbreviations will get you there, like say BBB) are not very common in corporate communication. The need for a smiling face sunglasses clad emoji was much stronger. Go figure.

It's somewhat amusing that even the first IBM PC had a smiley character. It's character number 1, no less (in code page 437).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437

My workaround is a nose :^)

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