Just yesterday I ran across this example: "(っ˘▽˘)っ :cloud: ⊂(◕。◕⊂)" in the Parse SDK repo, which I found especially distracting, and in general, kind of turned me off from the project (even though I know Parse is awesome). I agree that UTF and special-chars should be permissable; I don't agree that if they don't actually communicate something, they should be used anyway. Maybe this cute 'moticon trend is trendy, but for my buck$, I'd rather things just be kept simple. My eyeballs see (っ˘▽˘)っ :cloud: ⊂(◕。◕⊂) as line-noise, mostly, and make me wonder if there are other such typo's to be found in the attached code-base.
>Just yesterday I ran across this example: "(っ˘▽˘)っ :cloud: ⊂(◕。◕⊂)" in the Parse SDK repo, which I found especially distracting, and in general, kind of turned me off from the project (even though I know Parse is awesome).
This reasoning turns me off from types who have it.
It's not like they use emoticons everywhere -- and if having one is the big distraction one can complaint about, then their repo is in excellent shape.
Some Unicode characters can also move the cursor in strange ways. I think most of them only work in GUI programs, though. (See the list of bad strings above)
We are all gonna die anyway. The mature commiters too, including everybody they love.
And all of their "serious" work will amount to absolutely nothing in just 100 years (that's it if they're lucky: for most their work wont matter at all in 10 or 20 years, their companies shuw down, or bought and dismantled, their startup dreams shattered etc.).
(A lot of them will even regret working so hard and giving importance to the BS they gave importance to after they retire).
Just to put some mature perspective on being playful.