The article misses the rather important piece of trivia about technology compromises that what it has been calling “hyphen” is actually U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, rather than U+2010 HYPHEN. The situation there is a real mess: HYPHEN-MINUS is ugly in many fonts due to compromising between the ideal appearances of a hyphen and a minus sign, and HYPHEN is often missing from the font, leading to falling back to a hyphen from a different font rather than HYPHEN-MINUS from the same font (which is clearly more desirable, but technically unappealing).
A comment led to the follow-up https://www.punctuationmatters.com/the-difference-between-a-..., but it’s still very insufficient, only dealing with MINUS SIGN and assuming HYPHEN-MINUS was exclusively a hyphen. And appears to have suffered from the same replacement of lone HYPHEN-MINUS with EN DASH as this article.
I get why you wrote those words in all caps but it still feels like you’re yelling emphatically about nothing, and that coincidentally sums up how I feel about the rest of this topic.
It’s also very likely to be hypocritical: how many topics on HN are tuned towards a very specific kind of focus/nerdom? And what’s the point of commenting “aha, good for me that I don’t care aboutt this!…?
I guess the difference here is that someone’s boss might complain that they should follow this article, since we all write stuff from time to time.
Agreed it’s very HN. But it’s not just bad. Hackers are usually hard-wired to reduce entropy—we’re quick to point out when something is redundant or unnecessarily ambiguous. Formalia is also used for gatekeeping, which the HN Zeitgeist doesn’t like.
That said, personally I need my different dashes, commas and parentheses for my excessive wavering.
Made it 54 years without ever hearing about mdash/ndash/hyphen distinction. I've just been using the hyphen character for everything. Must have been absent that day in grade school.
A comment led to the follow-up https://www.punctuationmatters.com/the-difference-between-a-..., but it’s still very insufficient, only dealing with MINUS SIGN and assuming HYPHEN-MINUS was exclusively a hyphen. And appears to have suffered from the same replacement of lone HYPHEN-MINUS with EN DASH as this article.