A lot of Julia folks use the JuliaMono font, which has a minimal set of ligatures: https://juliamono.netlify.app/#contextual_alternates (just above this segment, they mention this very article as something they agree with).
I personally don't like any ligatures, especially when people use them in presentations to public like the article mentions. Confusion between operators is rare, but possible, for eg. when using Catalyst (https://docs.sciml.ai/Catalyst/stable/catalyst_functionality...).
> It seemed to me that the use of Greek letters and symbols is actively encouraged in the Julia documentation.
I don't remember getting that sense from the docs, but I may be wrong. The general convention is that Unicode at the level of user code is fine, and a lot of the community (including me) likes it because it makes it much closer to the actual equations and scientific notation we're working with. For libraries, it's strongly encouraged to have ASCII equivalents for any Unicode operators, keywords, etc. that you expose, and all the major libraries do this. The same is true in base Julia as well, every non-ASCII Unicode name has an ASCII equivalent too.
You know what, I'd tried JuliaMono in my editor (gVim) and for some reason didn't like it there, but making it my console font makes my terminal look so much better. Thanks for the recommendation.
It's definitely a slightly quirky font. It took me a bit to decide that I like it, but after a bit, I've gotten pretty used to it and it has become my default mono font.
I personally don't like any ligatures, especially when people use them in presentations to public like the article mentions. Confusion between operators is rare, but possible, for eg. when using Catalyst (https://docs.sciml.ai/Catalyst/stable/catalyst_functionality...).
> It seemed to me that the use of Greek letters and symbols is actively encouraged in the Julia documentation.
I don't remember getting that sense from the docs, but I may be wrong. The general convention is that Unicode at the level of user code is fine, and a lot of the community (including me) likes it because it makes it much closer to the actual equations and scientific notation we're working with. For libraries, it's strongly encouraged to have ASCII equivalents for any Unicode operators, keywords, etc. that you expose, and all the major libraries do this. The same is true in base Julia as well, every non-ASCII Unicode name has an ASCII equivalent too.