I recently started using a font that has ligatures - they don't break alignment of mono-spaced text, for example a two-character ligature takes up the space of two characters.
I am not thrown by != showing up as an equals sign with a slash through it, because I can remember that this is in fact "!=". It's easier to read than the "raw" version. All in all I'm sold.
I can remember that the inequality symbol means != but I'd prefer the lower cognitive load of not having to recall anything at all.
I like that Typing "!=" results in "!=" being printed to the screen. I like that pressing backspace only affects the single preceding character/glyph instead of converting the ligature back into its constituent parts.
It's a consistency thing. I'm never reading math textbooks written with latex and all the fancy ligatures and symbols. I spend my entire day reading and writing code, so consistency there is paramount.
Weird; I see the former symbol all day every day and have no trouble recalling. I see the second symbol almost never, maybe once a month, definitely not as easy to recall.
