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The Programmer Identity Crisis

(hojberg.xyz)
270 points imasl42 | 1 comments | 21 Oct 25 16:47 UTC | HN request time: 0.306s | source
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protontypes ◴[21 Oct 25 17:08 UTC] No.45658345[source]▶
Whenever I see an em dash (—), I suspect the entire text was written by an AI.
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defgeneric ◴[21 Oct 25 17:29 UTC] No.45658701[source]▶
I'm seeing this reaction a lot from younger people (say, roughly under 25). And it's a shame this new suspicion has now translated into a prohibition on the use of dashes.
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1. kazinator ◴[21 Oct 25 17:50 UTC] No.45659059[source]▶
I use three hyphens. In my case, I picked it up from Knuth's TeX many years ago; it's a lexical notation which typesets to a proper em dash.

Three hyphens---it looks good! When I use three hyphens, it's like I dropped three fast rounds out of a magazine. It demands attention.