Discussion on: Emoji😊🤣 In Python

[Ben Sinclair]

So Why not start using emoji in our python program

Oh go on then, since you asked :)

1. They're likely to be inaccessible or at best read out by screen readers in a long-winded format like, "man with medium-light skin tone smiling while holding beer one hundred" which is a pain to listen to every time.
2. You can't necessarily paste the code into everyone's editor
3. different cultures mean different things by different symbols
4. Different operating systems will use different emoji (Apple's water pistol in place of Microsoft's handgun for example)
5. They might be radically different depending on font
6. If the font's small, they all look a bit like pacman anyway
7. if you use them in variable names (which has become a bit of a "cool thing" in Javascript land) you literally have to copy-paste them each time because you're never going to guess what variation the original coder used.

I'm not a fan of emoji in general for these reasons (and others). In your example, I can only infer the "mask" one by context because to me it looks like a generic smiley, and the one that's defined as :red_heart: is... a white heart. And I'm not overrinding any fonts or anything clever like that. They're just not reliable for anything other than the most trivial case, and I'd steer clear of using them for any, shall we say, "professional" product because they might turn out to be unexpectedly inappropriate on some systems.

[Ankit Kumar]

thanks for pointing out the mistake I have not thought about that