As cool and readable as ligatures are in print design and typography, I find them to be unhelpful and even sometimes downright confusing when it comes to code.

As cool and readable as ligatures are in print design and typography, I find them to be unhelpful and even sometimes downright confusing when it comes to code. For me they violate a general (unspoken) principle of monospaced fonts, which is not just that each character is the same width, but that each character is discrete. It can be difficult to tell _how many_ characters the ligature comprises.