[jhanschoo]

> When I press backspace or cursor keys, I expect one glyph to be erased, not who-knows-how-many.

That's you, and not very generalizable. Many people edit on sites with ligatures and many people edit non-Latin text where isolated, non-ligatured text is wrong (Arabic, some Indic scripts, Han characters, Japanese katakana).

Me personally, with respect to code, I pretty much think in terms of tokens: to remove the `==`, I backspace twice, rather than that to remove the `==`, I remove `=` and then the other `=`, and each requires one backspace.

[hinkley]

Also ligatures in a monospaced font are going to tell you they’re multiple characters because they’re either fat af or misaligned. You know it’s coming.

To be honest though I think I like those big fat commas the best. As someone pointed out, using dot and comma as semantically important in software is a mistake because they only differ by one pixel.

[cosmotic]

Vertical columns of background have, until ligatures, been a bullet proof means for brains to delineate characters. Is it possible to figure out with an increased cognitive load? Yes. Is it exactly as easy as without? No.

[tadfisher]

I'm confused, because I can delineate the characters in your comment fine, and this is with my browser's default sans-serif proportional typeface. I tend to read English text left-to-right, though, so if others are more comfortable reading top-to-bottom (or bottom-to-top, or middle-out), then my apologies.

[cosmotic]

I'm confused too. The comment was about ligatures in computer code, but did not itself contain computer code.