I'm sure builders would struggle without diggers and cranes, and doctors would struggle without electricity. But why would I purposefully do away with useful modern inventions just so I can remain compitent without them?
Why would you occasionally lift heavy weights, only to put them back down, repeatedly? But this activity is viewed as beneficial by so many that there's an industry providing for it.
The key there is "occasionally". Fitness is deliberate practice: you don't just carry heavy weights when you need to get something done, you explicitly go when you have time to exercise your muscles.
Similarly, if you want to occasionally exercise programming without assistive technologies, more power to you. But if you're tying one hand behind your back while your goal is to actually produce useful code, then you're just being silly. Might as well use a screen reader instead of looking at the screen, or literally tying one hand behind your back.
I think assistive tech is awesome but we should so use it to learn. Instead of slowly looking up stuff in API docs and typing it out, running the compiler slowly to let it tell me I have a typo in a long method name I have an IDE with completion and it tells me right away if I did mistype something I didn't autocomplete.
But I should use this to learn too. Learning by doing. Autocomplete to find the method that I need and next time I remember the name already and I don't have to find it in an autocomplete list I type the unique part and autocomplete the rest. I just gained efficiency and I would also be able to program without the assistive tech when needed.
Like making use of the fact that I could walk to the grocers or bike and use that to work out naturally while getting fresh air. But if it rains I'll take the car. No need to pay a fitness studio.
I wonder if it would be possible to hire desk workers for 6 hours a week of manual labor that happens to also be good exercise. Surely there are people that would rather make 300 extra dollars a month for their 6 hours a week of exercise rather than pay a gym.
And one of the points of maximizing that strength-building effect in your body is to increase your body's capacity to effect change in the external world (with or without tools), is it not?
Because we have more efficient ways to lift weights, very few people get paid to do that. So, feel free to lift weights at home, but don’t expect to get a job loading a ship by manual labor.
It’s the same when writing programs: when at home, do whatever you want, but in a job, efficiency is key.
(Back to the subject at hand: I doubt whether ligatures help or hinder much, efficiency-wise)
You and the parent comment are polar opposites, I see.
How about it's fine, as long as I can still put my cursor in between the two underlying characters (edit them separately), and the resulting digram doesn't look so different as to be distracting?
