Programming ligatures are one thing. Your IDE manages them silently and transparently. They are client-side tech, not part of the actual data exchange. Teammates who find that they hurt code readability, rather than help it, are free to not use them in their own IDE.
But going out of one's way with escape codes or whatever, to insert a poorly-legible replacement for "?!", is simply awful.
I put it in my post, as I quite like the interrobang and will never pass up the chance to use it.
It's entirely legible, just uncommon - and "?!"?! just seems insert new character that represents gipping.
Is it "?!" or "!?" or "!?!" to indicate outrage, query and analysis, resulting in heightened outrage. Why not just add an f'in emoticon (shaped by you gurning at your iphone) seethes :)
Other countries and languages (Japanese, in particular) give the exclamation point the priority.
As a side note, I can't recall ever seeing the ligature of ?! before today. It feels like one of those typesetting relics we're better off not using.
I don't see anything wrong with the interrobang, although I don't think I'd go out of my way to use it, simply because it calls rather undue attention to itself. I wouldn't say that about most other ligatures, even some relatively uncommon ones; I'm sure that most people read text in set in Chaparral, for instance, without ever noticing that "Th" is a ligature in that typeface, because it looks optically correct in the same way the near-universal "fi" and "fl" ligatures do.
For the record, I can't find any supporting evidence about the ordering of punctuation marks; both "?!" and "!?" are non-standard in formal English, and the advice I've seen online -- and in the Chicago Manual of Style I have on my bookshelf I just checked -- suggest that an "exclamatory question" just uses the exclamation point. It's just that "?!" is more common when it gets used. (A question mark comes after an ellipsis not because of punctuation priority, but simply because the "..." indicates elided words, but doesn't replace the terminating punctuation mark.)
That's a matter of font choice, which (for HN, which doesn't go out of its way to stomp on user defaults) is, like the use of programming ligatures you have tried to distinguish on this basis, a client-side user decision.
Which characters are acceptable then? Only ASCII?
You can type it in X11 (and Wayland too IIUC) with Compose, !, ? (or ?, !).
Not a glowing example of DDG there.
You can also search “!s ‽” and get this: https://startpage.com/do/metasearch.pl?query=%E2%80%BD, but then you have to click “More” to see the full first paragraph of the Wikipedia page, and only then will it reveal the link to the full article there. The rest of the page is just clutter to me.