I'm not sure if this is an example of code ligatures, but I used to work with a guy who had configured his editor so that "=>" was replaced with some kind of special arrow character, and it used to drive me nuts. When I read code, I want to know what's actually there, and not have to ask "what does that arrow actually mean?"
But you have demonstrated that you know what the arrow means. Do you have your editor configured to display special symbols for all whitespace characters? Including newlines? Are you sure that you aren't just annoyed by looking at stuff you're not used to?
when chrome started hiding the https prefix from urls it still showed the same information as https was the only hidden prefix, yet a lot of people were similarly upset.
Code ligatures make text harder to read because they are not text, expecially when many of those ligatures are identical to actually existing unicode characters making the gliph more ambiguous than they laready were.
IMHO symbol should reflex their use: the dozens of different arrows used in math are meant to be handwritten or at least to be seen as a complex gliph.
=> and -> in almost every programming language is a = or a - followed by a >. We could very easily make a language where ⇒ is an operator (https://isabelle.in.tum.de/ does for example IIRC) but most languages use simple ascii characters for grammar for good reasons.
IMHO code ligatures are worse than a cursive coding font.
> Do you have your editor configured to display special symbols for all whitespace characters? Including newlines?
I actually have my editor configured to display special symbols for all control characters except U+000A NEW LINE (that includes U+0009 HORIZONTAL TABULATION as well, this is actually a control character, not a whitespace) and all whitespace characters except U+0020 SPACE.
