Nobody expects mathematicians to write all their formulae in ASCII either, they are allowed to use special markup to denote specific things. Why can't developers use more specific notation for displaying code? We use `==` for equality checks due to a limitation of typewriters, not because it's the only sensible way to do this. Give ligatures a chance for a single afternoon, and you'll see the value of purpose-specific glyphs. They aren't replaced by arbitrary hieroglyphs, but actually self-explanatory, helpful representations of the thing a bunch of characters are supposed to tell you.