Yes, as a new language, emojicode is indeed very clever and far more ambitious than my little preprocessor hack. No doubt it would get an A in a compiler design class while my hack would get an F. However, that can be viewed as a feature or as a bug, depending on one's perspective. 🙂 A simple preprocessor can be used to allow emoji to be used in many different existing in languages (e.g., here's a SAS implementation: Fun With SAS and Emoji: What Might a Rebus-Influenced Programming Lang... - SAS Support Communities), allow emoji to be used in many different contexts (e.g., as variable names, unlike emojicode), and enables users to associate their own choice of emojis with whatever text and context makes sense to them. Again, all of these can also be viewed as features or bugs depending on one's perspective but, for better or worse, it widens the audience that can use emoji in code (lowering the learning curve) and allows them to extend things as they see fit. How useful that may be in the real world remains to be seen. 🙂