The article is probably written to irritate, whether intentionally or not. While it's easy to accept that ligatures in public code is bad, he still goes on to s

The article is probably written to irritate, whether intentionally or not. While it's easy to accept that ligatures in public code is bad, he still goes on to say: > “What do you mean, it’s not a matter of taste? I like using ligatures when I code.” Great! In so many ways, I don’t care what you do in private. Although I predict you will eventually burn yourself on this hot mess... Also note the ending line: > If you don’t believe me, try it for 10 or 15 years." Well, ligatures has soon been in ten years or more in programming fonts. In many ways, the article has a good point, don't use ligatures in public code. It has second point too, which I think is not true: If you use ligatures, you may write logical bugs by twisted semantics. This is a statement, which would require statistical study on programmers who use ligatures and who doesn't. Do they write more bugs or not? I find some ligatures very helpful for readability, and thus they actually reduce bugs, but it's all in the eye of the reader.