I heartily agree. Ligature fonts and the word "performant" belong in the same circular filing cabinet, marked "not as clever as it seems".

I remember when I saw the access operator "->" for the firsr time written as just a single connected right pointing arrow on a whiteboard as part of my first intro to programming class and being so confused about what button I was missing on my keyboard!

IBM used to have a specific keyboard for APL programmers :-) Go big or go home.

The key (vulgo button) is not missing, merely the legend (vulgo labelling). In X, you can either press AltGr + i or Compose, -, >.

Performant: well-performing. There's nothing wrong with the word.

It was only added to the OED in 2018 after being misused in tech for fifteen or so years.

Originally a performant was someone who'd performed in something (similar to combatant).

Unfortunately it stuck.

Why is it unfortunate? The English language is built on an endless supply these mutations.

Just taste really, it sounds wrong to me.

On the scale of new words I dislike, it's nothing compared to how football pundits describe players as 'unplayable' when they're on form.

On a scale of new words I dislike, it's actually more annoying to me than "revert back" meaning "get back to you on that", which has a wry charm.

Mind you, I am still annoyed by people saying "addicting" when they actually mean "addictive", or "concerning" when they mean "a cause for concern".

So I'm really not a good judge. But it still has to go in the circular filing cabinet.

If we were better at keeping -ive suffixed words, we could have had concernive instead to shorten that phrase without misusing -ing. :)

Now you're just trying to upset me. ;-)

Greetings, fellow curmudgeons!

Surely the worst word to come out of sports pundits is "winningest"

Words are only ever added to the OED after a period of use.

Before performant made it into the OED as an adjective, the nominal form was listed as a "nonce-word" only and didn't merit its own entry; it was kept under performance. It was never widespread in any dialect, unlike modern performant.

-Ant/-ent is not reserved for nouns anyway. There are informants, inhabitants, defendants, and many others, of course, but they can be ignorant, hesitant, pleasant, constant, tolerant, conversant, triumphant, significant, vigilant, dominant, compliant, adamant, reluctant, elegant...

Some of the second group fall into both categories, adjective and noun. Frequently the one form came later than the other. Add performant to that long list.

Don't feel too bad. Everyone has to be wrong about something. Luckily for you it's something small like this ;-)

What am I missing?

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/perfo...

> What am I missing?

My joke?

(I always forget how HN is hostile to whimsy. Even when it is carefully signposted with an emoticon.)

Just to add though: a word making its way into a dictionary is no guarantee of its usefulness, correctness or value. It only means a couple of definitions have been found in print. That's the standard by which words make it into dictionaries; there's no semantic gatekeeper.

You're qualifying my response as "hostile?" I guess we're getting into fluid definitions, so sure :) I'm not sure calling someone wrong accompanied with an emoticon qualifies as whimsical, either.

All that said, "correct" in language is "incorrect" tomorrow. That's how it's always worked.

If I learned to accept "entitled" as meaning "given a title" I'm sure we can all handle a fairly terse and parseable usage for performant.

> You're qualifying my response as "hostile?"

No, not you -- that was exasperation at the sudden, aggressive downvoting of what was clearly signposted as a joke. > I'm not sure calling someone wrong accompanied with an emoticon qualifies as whimsical, either.

It was as clearly whimsical as I can make it. Complimenting on being wrong on something so small.

But you're just making my point for me. I genuinely forget this place hates jokes that don't come with footnotes.

> If I learned to accept "entitled" as meaning "given a title" I'm sure we can all handle a fairly terse and parseable usage for performant.

"Never give up! Never surrender!"

I think the issue is less jokes than posts without enough context to live on their own.

I've seen plenty of humorous posts received well here when they're not jokes for the sake of the joke.

Fair point.

I wholeheartedly agree. I don’t think I will ever understand why people want to mess with legibility in a craft that is so heavily dependent on using correct characters in correct places.

Author here, I agree. I use ligatures mostly because I write JS and it's not that annoying. Now that I wrote something about PHP it's a bit problematic.

I tried to like ligature coding fonts. I really wanted to like them. Ligatures are a really cool feature of prose fonts, and often even make text more readable. And they looked cool when I first encountered them in code. But every font I’ve tried with these ligatures added cognitive load in practice. And now I find the same when I see them in code examples.

Maybe there’s a way to do them “right”, where they have the same positive impact on code readability. But I haven’t found a font yet which pulls that off.

I’m not a font designer, so this is just using my imagination, but I suspect they’d work better if they still left some space in the monospace grid rather than fully spanning multiple characters. Eg => looks like an arrow but with a very fine gap (1px at any size? maybe 1 device pixel on high DPI at smaller sizes?) between the characters.

I think the hate for ligatures is overblown. You'll only encounter them in code, so you should instantly realize what they represent. I can understand _preferring_ to not have ligatures enabled, but hating them entirely seems unwarranted.

I mean, I don't hate them, but when I was reading this code, I came across a section that had what I presume was "===" (three equals signs) but it was three vertical lines the length of em-dashes stacked on top of one another, and this looks like absolutely nothing I can type.

And, I think that's really my objection to coding-specific ligatures. When you're used to them, you can "instantly realize what they represent," but they're rarely as clear as simply displaying the characters that you type. Historically, ligatures come from slightly tweaking the aesthetics of letter pairs or triplets to be (subjectively) more readable, never in ways that obscure the actual characters. Coding ligatures are arguably designed to obscure the actual characters being typed. That might be relatively inoffensive, like joining the characters in "=>" to make it look like an arrow, but it's not materially helpful -- and sometimes, like the Three Mystery Lines, it's actively puzzling.

> you should instantly realize what they represent

Often doesn't work in practice. I cannot instantly distinguish

• ‖ from ligated ||

• … from ligated ...

• ⁂ from ligated ***

• ⁇ from ligated ??

• → from ligated ->

• ↜ from ligated <~

• ↠ from ligated ->>

• ⇒ from ligated =>

• ⇔ from ligated <=>

• ⇜ from ligated <~~

• ∨ from ligated \/

• ∷ from ligated ::

• ≔ from ligated :=

• ≠ from ligated !=

• ≤ from ligated <=

• ≪ from ligated <<

• ⊢ from ligated |-

• ⋄ from ligated <>

• ⋘ from ligated <<<

• ◁ from ligated <|

• ⩵ from ligated ==

• × from ligated x with hex digits following

& al., but I have to examine the characters in kcharselect, a REPL or similar.

With monospaced fonts, as used in programming, the ligatures take up 2 or more "spaces", but the special characters only take up one space. Thus, they are quite easily distinguished, for me.

Linters will also complain if you find rare unicode symbols in your codebase as well.

It’s an opinion. About typography. I can’t understand having an opinion that another person shouldn’t have whatever opinion about typography they want.

If you really want to go down that rabbit hole, I was simply stating my opinion on another's opinion, and I can't understand having an opinion that another person can't understand another's opinion.

Liking or disliking something harmless is a matter of taste. Treating harmless preferences as subject to outside validation isn’t. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect that everyone is allowed to enjoy or prefer what they want, as long as no one is hurt by it.

You didn’t express a disagreement with the opinion, you expressed that the opinion shouldn’t exist. That’s not the same thing.

I said that the hate is overblown and unwarranted. That's not the same as saying it shouldn't exist; rather I was hoping to hear some good counterpoints to help me understand why some people dislike them to the point of hatred.