I feel the same way.
I do think I would enjoy programming in a language that used a slightly more extended set of real characters, as long as we had solid editor and font support so typing and viewing them wasn’t going to be an issue for anyone. For example, I’d like to finally have ≠, ≤ and ≥ lining up neatly with =, < and > in my code! I could imagine a few other carefully chosen and easily recognisable symbols, such as ∈ and true arrows, being helpful for readability as well.
But the world speaks in Unicode these days, so assuming there was adequate tool and font support, I think writing these characters for real would be much better than relying on ligatures. Even where ligatures are supported, they tend to use awkwardly wide glyphs to replace multi-character combinations so they don’t break alignment in a monospace font, and sometimes the fonts with programming ligatures seem to join certain combinations in bizarre ways just because they can, even when there’s no apparent need for it.
Ligatures in coding fonts are a poor workaround for bad keyboard layouts. If you want to see ≠ then type ≠.
Julia is the only ‘major’ language I know that supports most such characters.
[1] https://wiki.haskell.org/Unicode-symbols [2] https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_EKfCI8QuAaM/S7L-baZ-ZVI/AAAAAAAAD...
OS X is probably the best overall, with easy installation (with one gotcha for development) and SIL Ukelele being a decent editor.
XKB is tolerable, overcomplicated in some ways and limited in others (really needing a layout to be paired with an .XCompose), but Linux Desktops™ make it painful to configure any layout that doesn't ship with their system.
Pre-deprecation, there were formatters which would replace the two characters with the single unicode character if you wanted. If you use a language which supports unicode function names and operator overloading, you could easily add support for your unicode comparison operators.
Edit: Unless your reason for checking is that you explicitly want a marginally smaller file (possibly just at bytes level) to download (in which case just use one of the many online tools providing subsetting to strip unicode ranges and do something like remove everything except basic ascii?) there's no real point filtering for fonts without ligatures because, practically, that's just all of them
I'm primarily working in Javascript, so it may make more sense to use ligatures in my dev environment. And, as others have said, ligatures need to be explicitly enabled in your editor.
I respectfully disagree with this claim.
It's conventional code notation that != is a Boolean test for (in)equality; that convention doesn't apply to ≠, which is overloaded in mathematics.
But, taking your point, a ligature ≠ would be overloaded in representing != and ~= and /= and <> and becomes potentially very risky.
And if you go a bit beyond top 20, there's Haskell: /=
If I want to use ligatures, I have to explicitly enable it in my code editor.
Personally, however, I like to see exactly what it is I am typing, exactly which symbols are being used. Ligatures distort that.
Ligatures are fine when reading prose, but I find them too confusing when coding. That's a personal preference, though. I'm sure some people have no problem with them.
I expect a significant proportion of programmers do not like coding using fonts with ligatures, so it's interesting that this website only provides the ability to filter fonts to display only those with ligatures. I would have liked the option to only display fonts WITHOUT ligatures.