In programming certain word choices are valuable in this way. It's sad that pairs like true/false, good/bad, first/rest, and left/right are unequal length. But there are nice pairs like old/new, head/tail, fast/slow, same/diff, and right/wrong, which can help with create natural vertical alignment throughout a function.
In Japan they have the abbreviation “NG” (“not good”) that’s often used as the opposite of “OK”. I always liked how, when I worked for a Japanese machine learning company, classifiers would be between “OK” and “NG”. Maybe semantically “okay” and “not good” are not great opposites, but I always liked how having textual alignment makes the contrast immediately obvious
Log levels have me screaming internally
https://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.4.0/libdoc/logger/rdoc/Logger....
It's not unusual in France to use OK and KO. I never liked it much because it's too easy to confuse and no semantically a good opposite either, but visually it does look very balanced.
I wonder if that was part of the reason that some programming languages use constructs like "if / fi" "do / od" etc.
(Note: After writing the above, I checked with ChatGPT, it claims that the main motivation was to make it unambiguous which which "opening word" a "closing word" belonged to.)
Also have/want if old/new is already taken.
Ah, but I use a normal proportional font in my editor so same and diff have different widths.
That was the fun comment. The serious ones:
1. I'm trading the ability to align statements on consecutive lines for a more pleasant reading experience.
2. Nobody ever complained that my source code is
instead of 3. No tables or diagrams in comments of course but I think that I could configure my editor (emacs) to use a monospaced font there. I do use a monospaced font for the ``` ``` blocks of md files.4. I'm using Atkinson Hyperlegible Next https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/
2. You must have never written Haskell.
They would complain if it's:
You caught my OCD. I like to use upper / lower a lot.
Row/col works but width/height doesn't, alas.
But w/h does.
I sometimes use abbreviations like wd/ht. Should be understood with surrounding context.
I hope! And I abbreviate w w w.
There's only two things I hate in this world: people who do column alignment for vars and function params, and the Dutch.
> It's sad that pairs like true/false, good/bad, first/rest, and left/right are unequal length.
You're just matching them wrong. On/off and yes/no may look unequal, but what about yes/off or on/no?
This reminds me of all the (fun) times I had coming across “enable toggle” and “disabler enabler”.
Bonus points for taking “YES” (looking at you FreeBSD) or “1” or “ON”.
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