this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2026
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What is the accelerating rise of m-dashes from approximately 2014-2019 about? That trend apparently continued until very recently, even slowed down a bit, before exploding at some point in 2025 or 2026 for obvious reasons.
Does anyone have a theory?
People slowly learned to use their keyboards for proper typography?
That was a good one.
If the graph is not just using made up data, then it also measures absolute em-dashes, not em-dash density, so possibly could be an increase in interest in contributing to the kernel?
By a factor of roughly 10-fold? Maybe. It could indeed be a measure of overal absolute contribution. But post 2025 that could be influenced by m-dash density especially.
No, the comment I responded to was about the ~2014 uptick, not the recent one.
The recent one is obviously AI one way or another. Absolute contribution rate is higher due to AI as well.
Yeah sure, no I am not surprised about post 2025. My question was indeed about the post 2014 uptick.
The OP graph is just absolute count on the y axis, so I also assumed it was basically measuring LoC, but looking at this chart, the em-dashes do appear to be definitely more of a modern phenomenon compared to raw LoC:
Maybe some policy/tooling change around 2014? A guess is perhaps something to do with allowing UTF-8 in source files, but that's a pretty long shot.
Looking at that, the lines of code cannot really be the full story. M-dash count really just appears to rise from 2014 onwards.
I assume it's due to phone keyboards.
I don't think a lot of kernel devs are programming on their phone
That's why the number was low before.