| I'm a little miffed that the blog author doesn't have a good understanding on how Unicode and OpenType cooperates. Your first point is a great example of that. As for your second point, I think what I outline here solves most of the problems that the other commenters are arguing about. Actually, such features can be somewhat properly implemented in OpenType. You can tag these alternate glyphs as stylistic sets, with each stylistic set supporting so-and-so family of programming languages. Then, by default, an unaware editor would not perform the ligature substitution. However, proper support will still require some standard awareness from the editor through some standard API, so that it selects the right stylistic set for the right text (e.g. comments v. code). Emacs already does a form of character substitution through prettify; I use it all the time with LaTeX, and found it delightful to work with. It substitutes commands that stand for mathematical symbols with those mathematical symbols defined in Unicode. The limitation of this is that some of the features illustrated in Fira Code such as the prettified Markdown header don't have a corresponding Unicode code point, and thus necessarily has to be implemented as a ligature in a stylistic set. A final note on the productivity of substituting input characters with more semantically representative symbols for display: when done well, it is not obtrusive and shouldn't hinder productivity. After all, the Chinese and Japanese do this all the time with a more clunky system (IME) in their digital input, and they get by well enough with it. |