2026-10-26 10:16 UTC
Replies (5)
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@m532@lemmy.ml 2026-10-26 10:47
I assume it’s due to phone keyboards.
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@communism@lemmy.ml 2026-10-26 12:34
If the graph is not just using made up data, then it also measures absolute em-dashes, not em-dash density, so possibly could be an increase in interest in contributing to the kernel?
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@apparia@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-10-26 13:10
The OP graph is just absolute count on the y axis, so I also assumed it was basically measuring LoC, but looking at this chart, the em-dashes do appear to be definitely more of a modern phenomenon compared to raw LoC: Maybe some policy/tooling change around 2014? A guess is perhaps something to do with allowing UTF-8 in source files, but that’s a pretty long shot.
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@arty@feddit.org 2026-10-26 13:31
People slowly learned to use their keyboards for proper typography?
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@korazail@eviltoast.org 2026-10-26 16:57
I wonder how many em dashes are real vs interpreted. I love an em-dash, but I have never typed one on purpose; they are all just two minus in a row and I use them wrong – with a space around (*inspect source to see that lemmy translates for me). I abuse them like I abuse semicolons. They are a typographical tick that indicates a pause or pivot when I translate my thoughts to text. I can imagine a human manuscript editor turning punctuation like a comma into an em-dash when it makes sense, but I can’t imagine a developer ever specifically typing out one – with the need to either know or look up the unicode for it. The only relevant place would be a comment, but even then IDE’s are not generally known for their tendency to replace typed characters with something else. Maybe some tool in the pretty-print/code-formatter ecosystem added that as a feature? But var– is so common that I can’t imagine that’d be a good idea, even in a comment.