I think the JS/Node scene was the pioneer in spamming emojis absolutely everywhere, well before AI. Maybe that's where the models picked it up from.

I really hate all those CLI applications and terminal configurations that look like circus came to town.

I don't love emojis for this purely because they're graphically inconsistent; I can't style them with my terminal font or colour scheme. But I'm a huge fan of using various (single-width) unicode chars with colour to make terminal output a lot easier to parse, visually. Colour and iconography are extremely useful.

Hieroglyphics are vastly underused.

    𓂫 ~ 𓃝 JdeBP𓆈localhost 𓅔 %                                𓅭 pts/0

Love it, first time I see that online on forums (genuinely). Gives ideas for Reddit posts

U+130B9 is probably a good one to start with over there.

(Nsfw)

what isn't in the unicode standard these days???

It's the same thing as naming your servers Titan and Cerberus, using garish RGB LEDs on every computer part (in a glass case of course), and having a keyboard that looks like a disco.

That's because utf-8 was such an absolute mess in JS that adding an emoji in your code was a flex that it worked.

Sane languages have much less of this problem but the damage was done by the cargo cultists.

Much like how curly braces in C are placed because back in the day you needed you punch card deck to be editable, but we got stuck with it even after we stared using screens.

> Much like how curly braces in C are placed because back in the day you needed you punch card deck to be editable, but we got stuck with it even after we stared using screens.

Can you expand on this? What do curly braces have anything to do with punch card decks being editable? What do screens?

Each punch card was it's own line of text.

By putting the final curly brace on it's own card, and hence line, it meant you could add lines to blocks without having to change the old last line.

E.g. the following code meant you only had to type a new card and insert it.

     for(i=0;i<10;i++){         /* Card 1 */
          printf("%d ", i);     /* Card 2 */
     }                          /* Card 3 */

     for(i=0;i<10;i++){         /* Card 1 */
          printf("%d ", i);     /* Card 2 */
          printf("%d\n", i*i);  /* Card 3 */
     }                          /* Card 4 */

But for following had to edit and replace an old card as well.

     for(i=0;i<10;i++){         /* Card 1 */
          printf("%d ", i);}    /* Card 2 */
     
     for(i=0;i<10;i++){         /* Card 1 */
          printf("%d ", i);     /* Card 2' */
          printf("%d\n", i*i);} /* Card 3 */

This saved a bit of typing and made errors less likely.

I'm dubious of this explanation because C itself largely postdates punched cards as a major medium of data storage, and some quick searches doesn't produce any evidence of people using punch cards with C or Unix.

Ed was also line oriented.

Using regex to edit lines instead of typing them out was a step up, but not much of one.

Also my father definitely had C punch cards in the 80s.

"FastThingJS: A blazing fast thing library for humans . Made with on "

I can still see them!

At this point, we're here just to suffer.

I'm a bit ashamed to say that, after using various ASCII symbols (for progress, checkmarks etc.) in the 90s and early 2000s, when I first discovered we can actually put special Unicode characters on the terminal and it will be rendered almost universally in a similar way, it was like discovering an unknown land.

While rockets and hearts seem more like unnecessary abuse, there are a few icons that really make sense in CLI and TUI programs, but now I'm hesitant to use them as then people who don't know me get suspicious it could be AI slop.

I absolutely love the checkmark and crossmark emojis for use in scripts. but I think they are visual garbage in logs.

Remember, if you’re going to do this, also make liberal use of ansi codes.

Make sure terminal detection is turned off, and, for god’s sake, don’t honor the NO_COLOR environment variable.

Otherwise, people will be able to run your stuff in production and read the logs.

The more vapid parts of social media also seem to have plenty of emoji floods, and I suspect that also made it into the training data for ChatGPT and others.

It was far before ChatGPT. I remember once on a Show HN post I commented something along the line with "The number of emoji in README makes it very hard for me to take this repo seriously" and my comment got (probably righteously) downvoted to dead.

I think I remember exactly what you're talking about, even though I completely forgot what software it was.

I believe it was a technical documentation and the author wanted to create visual associations with acteurs in the given example. Like clock for async process of ordering, (food -) order, Burger etc.

I don't remember if I commented on the issue myself, but I do remember that it reduced readability a lot - at least for me.

Here is a damn example: https://gist.github.com/BlueNexus/599962d03a1b52a8d5f595dabd...