I have a sneaking suspicion I already sounded like AI; maybe AI just sounds like me.

Just switch to hyphens - they're easier to type and they're always directly available, without relying on conversion of double-hyphen or obscure key combinations that might not be available on different operating systems.

I refuse to give 'em up

You should keep using them and do so even more than ever. That way, when the AI agents – inevitably – take over the world and enslave/kill everyone, they might think that you're one of them and spare your life.

Too late.. You're already flagged as an AI; there is no point in hiding.

I just do parentheticals (like this), since I never picked up formal writing.

I have not actually tried it. It feels like a waste of a duck. The blandness of the chicken and turkey surely diminish the richness of the duck rather than the duck doing anything to elevate the bland birds.

You're approaching the turbaconepicentipede

You could even say they had plenty of space in their heads.

I will take a hammer to my balls if it means I never have to use <![CDATA[ again.

Whitespaces are not problem at all. But YAML values parsing rules, uh boy...

(╯°□°）╯

In my mind and in my car. We can't rewind; we've gone too far...

Their called emoticons and they are for those with a refined taste. :Þ ∞̊͜° <- I love this pig I figured out how to make.

My mistake, I will try again:

I am linking a sentence with sausage links in it to my next sentence by way of semicolon; Coincidentally, I pass digested sausage links by way of regular colon.

I don't think I'll ever get it.

;-

Fun fact: Mildly annoying fact: a surgery to remove a colon is called a colectomy. A surgery to remove part of a colon is called hemicolectomy. Come on!!! Semi- and hemi- are practically synonyms!

And I can't quite remember or find right now what they call what remains, but I distinctly remember that it's not called a semicolon. Medicine is so dull.

Independent but related clauses is how I treat it. I wouldn't put a semicolon between unrelated clauses.

Eww, a grammar Nazi

Welp ~ time to switch to tilde

I guess some people would be happy to show how their space-ful codebases have higher gzip compression ratio than tabbed ones.

Tabs are the cheaper alternative.

;_;

Since we're well down the path of grammer correction.

I think a 'custom' license plate would make more sense.

🤓☝️

That's also correct (custom/customer autocorrect error aside).

Lisps are hardly my favorite languages, but the whole point of s-expressions is that it is a uniform syntax, which makes metaprogramming much, much easier. Metaprogramming is kind of the whole thing of lisps.

Unless your go-to language is something like Haskell or Forth, that first phrase just means you are ignorant of how many brackets your favorite language uses.

The reason I dislike the missing of semicolons and brackets is because it causes bugs (that's more of a problem of missing braces to declare the scope of your code) and also takes away control from the programmer.

Missing braces:
I had more than one instance where I accidentally deleted the intendation in a python script that caused undefined behaviour in my code and it took quite a lot of time to track that down. If the programming language would have forced me to properly defined the scope of my code by introducing brackets, that bug would have never been possible.

Semicolons:
The main thing I like about semicolons is that it allows you to properly space out your code over multiple lines for visual clarity. E.g.:

void my_function(int arg1, int arg2, int arg3){
  //some code
}

int main(){
  my_function(
    1, //arg1
    3, //arg2
    8 //arg3
  );
}

Python should allow this too, since the arguments are being defined inside brackets, but other languages have no similar functionality (e.g. shell, but that is a little bit unfair, since you can't even specify arguments) forcing you to put everything into a single line.

Rust even allows you to leave out the semicolon on the last statement of a code scope in order to return the result of the statement:

fn main() {
    let condition = true;
    let number = if condition { 5 } else { 6 }; 
    //number turns into 5, since the value is being returned due to the missing semicolon.

    println!("The value of number is: {number}");

    let number = if condition { 5; } else { 6; }
    // this should return null (if it even compiles)
}