698 karma · joined April 4, 2017
archive.pouyakary.org
Back when I was a kid, there were two toy stores near my grandma's house and they had such a competition. And people were always buying and there was sort of a hype between the two, you could either believe in this or that. And then once my mom asked one of them about something and they told us both stores were owned by one person...
And now you can think you are with or against the corporate Java and in the end you are under Oracle no matter what.
I guess around fourteen years ago—back when I was at high school—I picked up the legendary TeXbook. I was in love and totally beguiled by the great Knuth's Art of Computer Programming; how could it be so beautiful? how could it be so precise? and henceforth as I understood that he had developed that masterwork of TeX to make his book, I immediately went to read it. There, in page four he writes:
> Book printing differs significantly from ordinary typing with respect to
> dashes, hyphens, and minus signs. In good math books, these symbols are all
> different; in fact there usually are at least four different symbols:
>
> a hyphen (-);
> an en-dash (–);
> an em-dash (—);
> a minus sign (−).
>
> Hyphens are used for compound words like ‘daughter-in-law’ and ‘X-rated’. En-
> dashes are used for number ranges like ‘pages 13–34’, and also in contexts like
> ‘exercise 1.2.6–52’. Em-dashes are used for punctuation in sentences—they are
> what we often call simply dashes. And minus signs are used in formulas. A
> conscientious user of T E X will be careful to distinguish these four usages, and
> here is how to do it:
>
> for a hyphen, type a hyphen (-);
> for an en-dash, type two hyphens (--);
> for an em-dash, type three hyphens (---);
> for a minus sign, type a hyphen in mathematics mode ($-$).
So I kept using the beautiful em dash ever since; because that is how the greats do it.
Keep your garbage for the court.