[thxg]

Ligatures are an interesting contrast to Julia programmers' habit of using actual (non-Latin) Unicode characters in their code. It seemed to me that the use of Greek letters and symbols is actively encouraged in the Julia documentation. I think they advise using editors that allow inputting special characters through their LaTeX equivalent (but source files are then saved to disk with the Unicode characters).

I am not very familiar with the latest trends, could anyone else chime in here? Do Julia coders use fonts with ligatures? That could indeed be one case where confusion is possible. Or maybe not?

[sundarurfriend]

A lot of Julia folks use the JuliaMono font, which has a minimal set of ligatures: https://juliamono.netlify.app/#contextual_alternates (just above this segment, they mention this very article as something they agree with).

I personally don't like any ligatures, especially when people use them in presentations to public like the article mentions. Confusion between operators is rare, but possible, for eg. when using Catalyst (https://docs.sciml.ai/Catalyst/stable/catalyst_functionality...).

> It seemed to me that the use of Greek letters and symbols is actively encouraged in the Julia documentation.

I don't remember getting that sense from the docs, but I may be wrong. The general convention is that Unicode at the level of user code is fine, and a lot of the community (including me) likes it because it makes it much closer to the actual equations and scientific notation we're working with. For libraries, it's strongly encouraged to have ASCII equivalents for any Unicode operators, keywords, etc. that you expose, and all the major libraries do this. The same is true in base Julia as well, every non-ASCII Unicode name has an ASCII equivalent too.

[kps]

Whatever font you prefer in the terminal, Julia Mono is an excellent fallback due to its high symbol coverage.

[grzm]

I'm not familiar with Julia, but I think a useful distinction can be made between input methods and ligatures. An input method is what you have to type to get a particular "code point" or character. Japanese, for example, is often typed using a latin keyboard, and as latin characters are typed, the application substitutes the appropriate Japanese character code point. For example, if I type the characters "n" (U+006E) and "i" (U+0069) using a Japanese input method, a に (U+306B HIRAGANA LETTER NI) (or 二 U+4E8C CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-4E8C or ニ U+30CB KATAKANA LETTER NI, or others as the case may be) can be selected to be entered. The actual character bytes will be substituted. You typed "n" and "i" but what gets stored is U+306B.

This is in contrast to ligatures: say if there's a fi ligature, I type "<" "=", and the "≤" character is substituted during rendering, but the individual characters are still the "character string". (You could also choose to directly insert the "≤" character directly, and that would then be a single code point, but I think for the purposes of this discussion, people are mostly talking about cases such as when the character string "<=" is rendered as "≤".

If Julia (like APL) uses characters outside the ASCII range as syntax, I suspect that there are input methods to assist in entering them as opposed to ligatures representing them on screen. But that's just naïve supposition on my part.

Another interesting case is TLA+ [1], where the language shares some LaTeX operators which can be rendered for display.

[1]: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/tla.html