[smohare]

I have the opposite experience with ligatures owning to years reading academic mathematics papers before coding seriously. I can still parse semantically dense symbology significantly faster than most code (even with years of experience) to the point where code seems almost comically inefficient. That said, I know many programmers take the implicit context intrinsic to mathematics symbology as often times an inexplicable cognitive load.

[_jyty]

If you have a lot of different symbols, it makes sense that ligatures would help to distinguish them more easily. So, ligatures for Haskell symbols also probably help, since there are so many infix operators in Haskell. There are also a bunch of old papers that showcase Haskell code and use the ligature representation of its operators.

However, most programming languages really just have a few symbols: arithmetic operators (+, -, /, *), comparison operators (<, >, <=, >=), and logical operators (&&, ||, !). C also has bitwise operators (~, &, |). It's already easy enough to distinguish these without ligatures, so the benefit is negligible here, IMO. I prefer to go without ligatures, because I have no trouble remembering or distinguishing them, and, like someone else mentioned, I find ligatures in a monospace font kind of weird (how they morph into a two column character when you write them, and turn back to a one column character when you delete half of it).