Emojis are everywhere. From Twitter to Facebook Chat, they've grown to become Oxford's 2015 Word of the Year and even featured in a horrendous movi...
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I find the lack of consistency in presentation of emoji to be a serious failing. Instead of adding meaning to words they've add ambiguity. You can only rely on emoji for adding flare, not functional meaning anymore, as it's impossible to know what the recipient is actually seeing.
And the shown emotions rarely line up with their descriptions in Unicode. It's like all font designers spend their lives devoid of human contact and don't actually know what these emotions are.
The change of a gun to a water pistol I also consider a defect on Apple/Google's part. They've changed the meaning of a character. This is similar to changing an
Ato aBrepresentation.To learn more about problems with Unicode strings in languages, also see my article The string type is broken.
I totally agree. Especially considering the fact that the next day, Microsoft changed its depiction of the gun emoji from a ray gun to a revolver.
This is why I also prefer using emojis as flare, as you said, and nothing more.
I actually read a funny article that addressed this lack of consistency a year or so ago, where they emphasized how the use of certain emojis could potentially distort your message, rather than clarify it.
Nevertheless, as more of a visual person, I still like using emojis in my commit messages for both the improved visual grepping and pure novelty.
The more pressing topic is why a Unicode programming language exists (emojicode.org). Great post.
Thanks! I stumbled upon this while researching for my post but figured out it's best not spreading the word about its existance. :D
I love emojis in commit messages when you use Github. I think they add a bit of flavor that looks really nice, possibly even more professional if you use them in a simple way.
But that's where emoji usage should really end for most projects. Unless your code is emoji-centric, there really shouldn't be emojis in code. I'm a Linux user, so emoji support outside of browsers is limited to colorless CSS symbol font style graphics, which are very hard to even recognize unless the font size is increased by a lot.
To be fair, modern editors tend to have built-in emoji support, but if I need to do anything in the terminal, that's where things tend to get annoying.
Great post! Glad you find Gitmoji useful 😜 🤙
Hey Carlos, thanks so much for taking the time reading this post. And I love gitmoji! :)
How do you use emojis on dev.to?