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Comment by mnx | Hacker News Reader

Off topic, but I think it's the first time I see emojis in commit messages. Nice to see that it works, but I don't know how to feel about it.

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Some projects that use emojis, actually use them with meaning. https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me

after scrolling through these, i'm left wondering why a checkered flag to represent a windows fix?

With recent(-ish) support for color emoji in Gnome terminal, where I work has fully embraced emoji driven development.

Kidding aside, it's fine but on older terminals (read: default terminal in ubuntu 16.04) they cause display issues, so they fit a bit better in the README.

> emoji ... cause display issues

Well, that gave me a stupid idea.

https://github.com/lloeki/he_comes

Whatever.

It's not nice to seem it work and I know exactly how I feel about them.

I really don't understand why people seem to hate emojis so much. They're the same as utf8 pictograms, except they're more styled. They can be really useful in my opinion.

Maybe it's because young people use them a lot in messaging apps and older people are like "gah! young people and their picture messages! grmbl"?

Or perhaps it's because sometime the meaning of emoji can be hard to understand, rather than "gah! young people"

I argue emojois make it easier to understand. Whether conveying sarcasm, frustration, joy or anger. It's much easier to infer the tone of a message using emojis.

I'd agree that for emotional context, it can be useful. But I don't think the way they are used there is easy to understand. I mean what's the meaning of the heart regarding CI or the pen for bugs? Is that indicative of a categorie of commit (CI, bug-fix...) or just to decorate the message?

Also another issue is that emojis are not as easily indexable/searchable.

Well, in this comment thread we have "it's not nice to see them work [in this case]" and "I'm not sure how I feel about emojis working [in this case]."

So, no, I don't think the issue is that they don't work in this case.

HN definitely does have a knee-jerk hate for them, and if you spend enough time here you'll see that a lot of it really is just "gah, young people." It's the new hate on txt-speak.

Exactly. They are ambiguous, increase visual clutter and not backwards compatible with older systems.

Even if they manage to convey a meaning, like the other poster said, that meaning is emotional instead of factual.

Why would anyone ever wish to express emotions in a commit message, or even in a business communications tool like Slack, is beyond my comprehension.

For personal communication they can serve a purpose, but that's not the topic here.

I'm relatively young. I use emojis daily - they are part of the way we use slack in our company. I still don't really like them. It just feels like they are necessary because we have no standard for embedding actual pictures - and so we are cramming more and more of them into Unicode, using weird hacks like zero-width-joiner sequences, and so on. The rate at which they are added, means any given implementation is likely to be out of date, and display nonsense. They are also often a confusing way to communicate.

And yet, I don't quite hate them - they can be useful. I just wish we had something better.

This isn't ancient Egypt, or MessoAmerica, or any of the other places on the planet that invented/used symbology/ pictogram/hieroglyphs to communicate.

It makes communication MORE difficult and LESS clear. Text communication is a direct conversion(translation) of speech. You don't say:

"left arrow-jump-levitate-smiley face"

You do however say:

"I'm jumping for joy"

But consider the other possible meanings:

"Gravity is lower over there. Wee. This is fun"

"Did you see jump back there? WooHoo!"

"In the past I would practice yoga and meditation. I liked it."

... and i could go on. Because say it with me:

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Which of those thousand words depends on the individual decoding/defining/interpreting the message.

If you find you are unable to convey a clear, concise, unambiguous message using text; you need to read more and perhaps go back to school.

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