Aside, but I hate ligatures in code. If I didn't know what they were, I would have no idea what the blog's representation of a fat arrow => or a triple equals were. As it is, I still have to translate them before I fully get it.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/perfo...
My joke?
(I always forget how HN is hostile to whimsy. Even when it is carefully signposted with an emoticon.)
Just to add though: a word making its way into a dictionary is no guarantee of its usefulness, correctness or value. It only means a couple of definitions have been found in print. That's the standard by which words make it into dictionaries; there's no semantic gatekeeper.
All that said, "correct" in language is "incorrect" tomorrow. That's how it's always worked.
If I learned to accept "entitled" as meaning "given a title" I'm sure we can all handle a fairly terse and parseable usage for performant.
No, not you -- that was exasperation at the sudden, aggressive downvoting of what was clearly signposted as a joke. > I'm not sure calling someone wrong accompanied with an emoticon qualifies as whimsical, either.
It was as clearly whimsical as I can make it. Complimenting on being wrong on something so small.
But you're just making my point for me. I genuinely forget this place hates jokes that don't come with footnotes.
> If I learned to accept "entitled" as meaning "given a title" I'm sure we can all handle a fairly terse and parseable usage for performant.
"Never give up! Never surrender!"
I've seen plenty of humorous posts received well here when they're not jokes for the sake of the joke.
Originally a performant was someone who'd performed in something (similar to combatant).
Unfortunately it stuck.
On the scale of new words I dislike, it's nothing compared to how football pundits describe players as 'unplayable' when they're on form.
Mind you, I am still annoyed by people saying "addicting" when they actually mean "addictive", or "concerning" when they mean "a cause for concern".
So I'm really not a good judge. But it still has to go in the circular filing cabinet.
Before performant made it into the OED as an adjective, the nominal form was listed as a "nonce-word" only and didn't merit its own entry; it was kept under performance. It was never widespread in any dialect, unlike modern performant.
-Ant/-ent is not reserved for nouns anyway. There are informants, inhabitants, defendants, and many others, of course, but they can be ignorant, hesitant, pleasant, constant, tolerant, conversant, triumphant, significant, vigilant, dominant, compliant, adamant, reluctant, elegant...
Some of the second group fall into both categories, adjective and noun. Frequently the one form came later than the other. Add performant to that long list.
Maybe there’s a way to do them “right”, where they have the same positive impact on code readability. But I haven’t found a font yet which pulls that off.
I’m not a font designer, so this is just using my imagination, but I suspect they’d work better if they still left some space in the monospace grid rather than fully spanning multiple characters. Eg => looks like an arrow but with a very fine gap (1px at any size? maybe 1 device pixel on high DPI at smaller sizes?) between the characters.
You didn’t express a disagreement with the opinion, you expressed that the opinion shouldn’t exist. That’s not the same thing.
Often doesn't work in practice. I cannot instantly distinguish
• ‖ from ligated ||
• … from ligated ...
• ⁂ from ligated ***
• ⁇ from ligated ??
• → from ligated ->
• ↜ from ligated <~
• ↠ from ligated ->>
• ⇒ from ligated =>
• ⇔ from ligated <=>
• ⇜ from ligated <~~
• ∨ from ligated \/
• ∷ from ligated ::
• ≔ from ligated :=
• ≠ from ligated !=
• ≤ from ligated <=
• ≪ from ligated <<
• ⊢ from ligated |-
• ⋄ from ligated <>
• ⋘ from ligated <<<
• ◁ from ligated <|
• ⩵ from ligated ==
• × from ligated x with hex digits following
& al., but I have to examine the characters in kcharselect, a REPL or similar.
And, I think that's really my objection to coding-specific ligatures. When you're used to them, you can "instantly realize what they represent," but they're rarely as clear as simply displaying the characters that you type. Historically, ligatures come from slightly tweaking the aesthetics of letter pairs or triplets to be (subjectively) more readable, never in ways that obscure the actual characters. Coding ligatures are arguably designed to obscure the actual characters being typed. That might be relatively inoffensive, like joining the characters in "=>" to make it look like an arrow, but it's not materially helpful -- and sometimes, like the Three Mystery Lines, it's actively puzzling.