Honest question: can someone explain why everyone loves emoji these days, especially with regards to 'modern' programming communities such as those around JS and Rust? Is it just a celebration of the fact that we have Unicode support everywhere now?
It's just that people somehow enjoy this new new dimension of expression in text-only media. It has long been pretty obvious that text lacks the subtlety of face-to-face or voice interactions, and that many problems stem from people misjudging the intended tone of writing. Emojis, while imperfect, may help ;)
What do you have against emojis? I'm hoping I can set my hostname to all emoji characters (UTF-8) so that other workstations on the network will show my hostname as those emoji characters.
To me the combination of both gives a hell of a lot more to base interpretation of tone on.
2. What about emoji's that aren't faces, or that have taken on a different meaning (see, eggplant or that infernal clapping emoji that's taken over twitter)
Communication is messy as hell, and the fact that emoji's render differently doesn't add that much confusion in most cases (of course there are the odd watergun vs revolver emoji problems, but the worst offenders are slowly being brought into line)
However, emojis can change when sending them from my Android phone to an iPhone, changing the meaning of the message inadvertently.
But in day-to-day chats they're useful. Text is extremely bad at conveying emotion and nuance. Stuff like humor, sarcasm, irony is really hard to transmit, especially with more people. A well placed emoji/smiley can help.
I heard that for some folks it makes it easier to find the right commits, unfortunately it's the opposite of being inclusive because other collaborators can become easily distracted by them.
If it makes writing commit messages more fun and it means that people will make more of an effort to come up with descriptive messages then I say amazing. I can't count the number of open source projects where people write absolutely useless commit messages, even coming from projects I respect. I'll take emojis over "several changes, new stuff" or "some other small fixes" (to quote actual commits from an open source project I've been hacking on lately).
Of course both things are largely unrelated but I just wanted to point out that there's not a very strong "commit etiquette" in the hacker community as of today, it's not like much of value will be lost by letting kids use emojis in them, and maybe a little could be gained.
I don't believe that, the confusion around the meaning of emojis are well established[0][1][2][3].
I strongly suspect that the confusion and vagueness is even more predominant in professional communications than personal. Please consider that everyday the likelihood of someone reading your code who is from a different culture or context is even higher, somethings might seem obvious to us, but that is not necessarily objectively so.
If you think I am making an argument for using plain and simple language and not just avoid emoji, you're right, that is the point.
From a pure economic point of view, considering the arguably nonexistence value emojis provide, any risk or cost is too much.
0. https://www.businessinsider.com/science-reveals-the-most-con...
1. http://fortune.com/2016/04/14/emoji-miscommunication-study-u...
2. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3549376/Frust...
3. https://www.mrporter.com/journal/modern-problems/the-most-co...
I also think you're placing to much value on some vague notion of "professionalism" which seems to exclude all emotion and any fun.
"Professionalism" in this sense stymies business success by, for example, prohibiting the effective means of communication people choose for themselves with some nebulous argument to appearances.