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Comment by kaba0 | Hacker News Reader

I mean, not even a bad idea. I would honestly prefer operators to be more explicit like a-variableanother-varsomething-else. (EDIT: HN removed my emojis, but imagine a plus/minus emoji inbetween ids :( )

With a good font it would basically look similar to what a good IDE with syntax highlighting already does (different color for operators).

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I think this would be a bad idea because emoji are hard to type.

This might be a bit old school but I prefer things limited to plain ASCII. There's only so many keys on a keyboard and want to be able to touch type everything without thinking or looking at a special emoji bar.

That I absolutely agree with, but I think it is about time we let go of “programs as plain text” axiom. With good tooling/IDE — which are already sort of visual editors only converting to and from to plain text on save — you could enter a ‘+’ and get autocomplete show the “emoji +” as an option for example. Because the actually important question to ask here in my opinion is “what is the easiest way to read/comprehend programs”, and we seem to have implicitly agreed that syntax highlighting is already a must (which works on even not yet valid program text!). Slightly more reliance on tooling doesn’t seem too bad to me.

With a proper keyboard layout, you can type a lot of unicode: https://michaelgoerz.net/notes/the-us-international-scientif...

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