This thread is getting dangerously close to name-calling. It’s hardly productive to have a shouting match between unicode haters and unicode enthusiasts. It’s not like anybody is going to convince the other.
Julia’s unicode support is a fact of life. If you don’t like unicode, don’t use it in your code base. As soon as you want to contribute to other people’s code, you’ll have to contend with their use of unicode. If I were to submit patches to @PetrKryslUCSD’s code, I’d make sure they’re in ASCII. Conversely, I wouldn’t accept contributions that don’t match the extensive use of unicode my projects.
In practice, there seems to be a pretty strong consensus in the community:
- Don’t force unicode for public APIs. So no unicode in types / function names, and no unicode keyword arguments without ASCII aliases
- Limit unicode to where it relates to existing mathematical notation. Non-scientific code doesn’t need unicode identifiers.
Seems quite sensible to me, and at least in my opinion, the judicious use of unicode greatly enhances the readability of scientific code. But everyone is going to follow their own philosophy, and things will land where they’ll land.