They're definitely polarizing, in the sense that some people intensely dislike them and never use them, others love them and always use them.
It reminds me of the debates about font antialiasing back in the 1990s. A vocal minority of programmers then insisted that font antialiasing wasn't suitable for coding, as a pixel-oriented monospace font (e.g. Monaco at 9 points) provided better text density and better readability[1].
Then, like now, I could see the validity of the arguments of both sides. Readability is a highly subjective thing (and also varies over time, even for the same person). And the screens and antialiasing algorithms of the day weren't as sophisticated as what we now enjoy.
Personally I waffled on it for a while, but now I always code with ligatures enabled in my main work (which is predominantly using TypeScript and Rust, so the default ligatures of these fonts make sense).
I suspect that the majority opinion will shift to using ligatures for coding (if it hasn't already) once that is the default experience of most editors with the default fonts, and it becomes something you have to turn off, rather than turn on.
[1]: This is an example of Monaco, although what they show as 12 point is how I remember 9-point looking... not sure if my memory is faulty or what, though, it was a long time ago. https://www.fontriver.com/font/monaco/
It reminds me of the debates about font antialiasing back in the 1990s. A vocal minority of programmers then insisted that font antialiasing wasn't suitable for coding, as a pixel-oriented monospace font (e.g. Monaco at 9 points) provided better text density and better readability[1].
Then, like now, I could see the validity of the arguments of both sides. Readability is a highly subjective thing (and also varies over time, even for the same person). And the screens and antialiasing algorithms of the day weren't as sophisticated as what we now enjoy.
Personally I waffled on it for a while, but now I always code with ligatures enabled in my main work (which is predominantly using TypeScript and Rust, so the default ligatures of these fonts make sense).
I suspect that the majority opinion will shift to using ligatures for coding (if it hasn't already) once that is the default experience of most editors with the default fonts, and it becomes something you have to turn off, rather than turn on.
[1]: This is an example of Monaco, although what they show as 12 point is how I remember 9-point looking... not sure if my memory is faulty or what, though, it was a long time ago. https://www.fontriver.com/font/monaco/