In my experience removing the gaps makes some symbols harder to read. Like distinguishing `==` and `===` without gaps is harder, though admittedly three-bar helps. Also, I find the ligatures I've tried a bit of an eye-sore, but that's just personal taste.
What's a more serious concern is the "dumbness" mentioned in the article and the handling of ambiguous cases. To give my own example, in addition to those in the article, I use a series of more than 3 equals signs as a delimiter in my notes. With programming ligatures it looks distractingly bad. Normally it's a continuous row of two-bars, but with them ligatured they look like morse code divided into short groups of long two-bars. Essentially, when I'm writing code or whatever, I don't want there to be someone guessing what I mean and how I want something to look. Unless he guesses always right, he's a nuisance. Sorry for the personification.
The article is "ligatures are always wrong for everyone in code" and your position seems to be "ligatures are wrong for me and people who are reading my code in their editor".
I don't think anecdotes of cases where ligatures fail support a case for them being wrong for all people and all situations.
Personally, I've never had a single instance of them doing something dumb in 2+ years of using them. Never a single instance of them creating any ambiguity or failing to add clarity to my reading of code. Dumb in "theory" might be smart enough 99% of the time.
Just in the last couple months, I had to review code without the aid of a linter and they were invaluable.
Well it is a matter of personal taste, isn’t it? For me it is just the opposite, the visual appearance of the ligatures burned itself itnto my brain in away that it is easier to spot when it is not there. Sometimes something not converting to a ligature can also be a hint (e.g. for a wrong hyphen beeing used etc)
In my experience removing the gaps makes some symbols harder to read. Like distinguishing `==` and `===` without gaps is harder, though admittedly three-bar helps. Also, I find the ligatures I've tried a bit of an eye-sore, but that's just personal taste.
What's a more serious concern is the "dumbness" mentioned in the article and the handling of ambiguous cases. To give my own example, in addition to those in the article, I use a series of more than 3 equals signs as a delimiter in my notes. With programming ligatures it looks distractingly bad. Normally it's a continuous row of two-bars, but with them ligatured they look like morse code divided into short groups of long two-bars. Essentially, when I'm writing code or whatever, I don't want there to be someone guessing what I mean and how I want something to look. Unless he guesses always right, he's a nuisance. Sorry for the personification.