9 ms·

A case against syntax highlighting (2007)

29 points by jb1991 10y ago

ajkjk 10y ago
Apparently I'm supposed to believe "Perhaps syntax highlighting was invented to speed up the reading process. ... Well, no. One of the basic rules of thumb in typography is that, when writing a piece of text, you should choose one typeface and stick to it" and then believe the rest of the article. Well, I don't believe that part, since I experience the complete opposite every day. A silly typographical guideline doesn't affect my experience at all.
draw_down 10y ago
Semantics are more important than syntax, sure. But it doesn't matter what the semantics are if you screw up the syntax, which you will be more likely to do without syntax highlighting because you're a hairless ape. I just don't see an actual reason not to use it, but if you don't want to, knock yourself out I guess.
savanaly 10y ago
>Well, no. One of the basic rules of thumb in typography is that, when writing a piece of text, you should choose one typeface and stick to it. Likewise, a splash of colour may grab the reader's attention, but it will inevitably decrease the legibility of the text. The natural flow of the text is broken, and it takes more brain effort to piece together the individual letters into words and semantics. Cognitively, the reading process becomes slightly less automatic and slightly more conscious; leaving less room in the conscious part of the mind for actually understanding the text. That might be true for text, but I don't read code at all the way I read prose. I highly doubt i've ever read more then four or five lines of code in a row without my eye jumping to other parts of the function, forward to the next part to understand why variables are being set up, or backwards to remember when such variable was defined, or jumping to the big picture to remember how this function or that fits into the overall program. Syntax highlighting is enormously helpful to my eye when reading in that manner.
- bpchaps 10y ago
  Yes, and that's your opinion. Not mine. Not his. It's an opinion piece, but you and just about everyone in this thread is writing as if their opinion is a fact that trumps his opinion. Stop that :(. Edit: Why the downvotes? Are different opinions really that bad?
  - acbabis 10y ago
    Except the article is not an opinion piece. The author makes a factual claim that removing syntax highlighting makes the code ironically easier to read. That's something that could be measured and either confirmed or refuted in a lab.
    - bpchaps 10y ago
      For some of us, syntax highlighting DOES make code more difficult to read. We're all different. I learned most of what I know on a Solaris 9 machine on a CRT with a model m back in 2008 with zero syntax highlighting, in vi and without vim. Zero fluff. I've tried syntax highlighting, but every time I do, I end up going back and my code quality and readability improves. I imagine a similar effect would happen to others if their colors were changed to incredibly tacky colors.
  - Nadya 10y ago
    >Do you rely on syntax highlighting when developing software? If so, you may be shooting yourself in the foot. In this post, I will argue that syntax highlighting, while aesthetically seductive, moves focus from content to form, and discourages those who look at the code from trying to understand it. The very first opening line is an argument against syntax highlighting. Arguments (at least, of this sort) should be based on facts or studies, or at least logical reasoning and it is not introduced as an opinion piece, but an argument. I only gave the article a glance and I take two issues with it. >Syntax highlighting applied to fiction. It's easy to spot all the verbs, but why on Earth would you want to do that? I wouldn't need to for English, however I can think of a situation where I'd like to see the difference between an int '5' and a string '5' at a glance. In fact - that sort of bug isn't all that uncommon in languages that aren't hard typed. >[misguided piano teachers, yellow keys]...but do they honestly believe that children are unable to learn note names? They will have to, eventually, and then they will have to un-learn the colours. This argues like a case against mnemonics as learning devices. Mnemonics are an entire memory trick designed to be "un-learned" by the learner. Planet names aren't difficult to learn but a sentence like "Mercury Viewed Earth’s Many Aspects Joyfully Sitting Under Neptune" sure makes the order from the sun easier to remember. Mnemonics are a pretty well-research thing and they work [0]. Most people who want to compete in memory contests rely on using them. My favorite example is the Major System [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system
joslin01 10y ago
> It's easy to spot all the verbs, but why on Earth would you want to do that? The big difference between genuine reading and coding is the variability of scanning / focus. When you read, you usually want to take it all in -- it wouldn't make sense to jump around because it's a single, linear journey. Code does not observe this rule, so the more experience you get as a coder, the better scanner you become. You quickly view a class and think "ah yes yes.. it's _roughly_ doing this.. that" -- you sure as heck don't read the whole thing carefully word by word! The best coders are amazing scanners -- capable of pointing out a missing parenthesis in a sea of parenthesis. This argument against syntax highlighting is like taking the batteries outta our flashlight. Sure, we'd be more careful but our productivity would surely suffer.
- oconnore 10y ago
  I've been working without highlighting for ~6 months, and I've gotten faster at scanning, not slower. Feel free to keep doing what you're doing, but making assumptions about workflows that you're unwilling to try is not helpful or convincing.
  - joslin01 10y ago
    I want you to know this comment is every bit as subjective and "not helpful / convincing" as you think mine is except mine had deductive reasoning -- yours is just anecdotal. I only been coding for 10 years, so maybe some veterans who been coding since the 70s can share their experience and we can weigh it against yours. I also question that you indeed are a faster scanner. Here's a specific example I wonder if your scanning would win out on -- Xcode turns internal Cocoa classes blue whereas your own classes are green. You quickly know what you coded and what you didn't. Not helpful? Should already know? I wonder if you inherited someone else's code base if you would enjoy the green immediate feedback rather than the inference you would otherwise have to take.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - 10y ago
nikki-9696 10y ago
I'll keep it, thanks. My life is far easier with it. You are welcome to use Notepad.
- bpchaps 10y ago
  Ever use vi/emacs/nano/etc? Pretty sure not everybody who doesn't like syntax highlighting only uses notepad ;).
  - charonn0 10y ago
    Don't vi and emacs support syntax highlighting? ^Ocomment.txt^X
    - pyre 10y ago
      nano supports syntax highlighting, IIRC. Not sure if pico does. If you're a fan of Motif you could even used Nedit.
    - bpchaps 10y ago
      Yeah, but claiming that zero syntax highlighting automatically implies Notepad is pretty ridiculous. Does vi support it, though? I know vim does.
    - figgis 10y ago
      vi and emacs certainly support syntax highlighting. Nano does as well. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19444340/how-to-specify-syntax-highlighting-in-vi-editor http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19444340/how-to-specify-s... In fact the only text editors that I know of off the top of my head that do not support syntax highlighting is notepad and pico.
dahart 10y ago
Heh. The example of highlighting = vs == different just proves the value of syntax highlighting for me. Misspelling keywords is the same thing, a highlighting (or lack thereof) can alert you to the fact that you flubbed the spelling, and save you from a compile or runtime error. Programming language keywords are different than English verbs. If you misspell keywords, your program will fail, but if you misspell a verb in an essay, nothing catastrophic happens, most of the time. It does take me longer to read code in an uncolored ssh window than in Sublime with syntax highlighting, that's true. And I agree that semantics are more important than syntax. But I'm not sure I buy that having highlighting makes reading colored code slower than it would be otherwise. The case here didn't present evidence that it's worse. It might be a crutch, but it's also possible that the reason reading uncolored code is slower is because having syntax highlighting is actually better than not having it.
- nv-vn 10y ago
  Misspelling a keyword is a low-cost issue. The compiler will point it out to you immediately, and compilers are very fast these days. Nothing happening here is very catastrophic.
  - sp332 10y ago
    Not all languages are compiled.
  - pyre 10y ago
    What happens when your compile step takes a full minute to complete? Sure it's only a minute lost, but it also breaks your flow.
  - dahart 10y ago
    Having a compile fail is catastrophic, not in the sense of the amount of effort it takes to fix, but in the sense that the computer has completely rejected your input. Your compile or execution failed. It won't work without change. Misspelling English doesn't usually cause a complete failure, or force you to try again, that's my point. The example in the essay was a cute comparison that I think actually is worth considering, but is ultimately comparing apples to oranges. But, no matter how fast your compiler is, the cost of finding and fixing a mis-spelling in your editor with syntax highlighting is much less expensive than finding them and fixing them with a compiler or by executing the program. Could be a few seconds per typo less expensive, but my professional experience has generally involved builds that take 1-10 minutes. I'll take the syntax highlighting crutch over waiting for my compiler to fail.
jasode 10y ago
copypaste of my previous comment about this: I've not found the Alice-in-Wonderland analogy colorizing the "verbs" to be convincing. With human language like English, we learn it and use it without the formal grammar++. A 5-year old child can speak to her mother ("I want some candy!") without conscious knowledge of "verbs" or "nouns". A formal grammar for categorization is what we layer on top of language for analysis in school. Two people can communicate and understand each other without any exposure to any grammar lessons. So yes, colorizing verbs looks superfluous and noisy.[2] On the other hand, computer programming syntax starts with grammar. You learn that certain specific tokens are "data types" and other tokens are "literals", etc, etc. And that grammar categorization in programming languages never goes away as you're typing out new code. (Otherwise, you'd get a compiler error or unintended behavior because x="3"+"5" with quotes ("35") means something different from x=3+5 without quotes (8).) This is why so many experienced programmers find color highlighting helpful even if they've been programming that language for 10+ years. Sure we want to focus on higher cognitive purpose of "semantics" but the grammar is deeply intertwined with reconstructing what the semantics is. A closer analogy of color highlighting in a different realm would be different colors in TCPIP traces such as "red" highlighting external ip addresses. This can be helpful for forensics of malware phoning home. Or in financials dashboards where uptrends are "green" and downtrends are "red". The same reasons that colors help the malware analyst or stock trader quickly parse data at a glance is also how it helps programmers. ++ (at least not consciously that a 5-year old would be self-aware of it. A theory of innate universal grammar in the brain by Chomsky isn't what I'm talking about.) [2] except for rare examples of using annotation or coloring of verbs to help parse sentences like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...
pbreit 10y ago
For me syntax highlighting is almost exclusively to reveal my syntax errors and in that respect is a godsend. This article doesn't resonate with me at all.
btilly 10y ago
I understand the spirit, but it is wrong. Syntax highlighting is helpful to me for the following purposes. 1. Scanning through code. 2. Making it clear what is a comment, what is a string, and what is code. 3. Catching a variety of minor syntax errors automatically. (For example failing to properly close a multi-line quote...) 4. When switching languages, reminding me when I didn't fully switch gears and wound up using the wrong keyword. I learned to program in vi without syntax highlighting. Before I tried syntax highlighting, I thought it was silly. After I tried it, I found it made for a more comfortable environment. The difference isn't huge, but it is noticeable enough that now I always turn it on.
- hosh 10y ago
  I have a similar experience. I learned to program as a kid with BASIC (no editor). I learned to read code while I was young because I was too lazy to type the BASIC games found in magazines, so it was easier to parse the game and play it in my mind. I cut my teeth on the MudOS platform, using the in-game `ed` to for rewriting backend code. I didn't use syntax highlighting for a long time. There are times when I log into a system to edit something with vim, and no syntax highlighting appears. It surprises me, but not a deal-breaker. I also thought syntax highlighting was unnecessary. The first time I saw a video of using the Twilight theme for Sublime, I was stunned by what the colors brought out. At that time, my awareness was not as developed, so I couldn't even tell you I liked it because of how I experienced the code. So I spent a lot of time finding good themes for my editors, first vim and now spacemacs. If I am going to look at code all day, I don't want my eyes to bleed. Aesthetics is the strongest argument I have for syntax highlighting, and it should not be casually dismissed without investigation.
  - btilly 10y ago
    Aesthetics matters a lot. Here is a simple example. Light text on a dark background tends to be more readable, but may depress some people. Dark text on a light background is the opposite. It sounds stupid, but it matters.
panic 10y ago
I think there's a middle ground here. Most syntax highlighting uses extremely saturated clashing colors. The feeling you get for the "texture" of the code is useful, but it can make the code hard to read all at once. Using a more toned-down theme brings back some of that legibility without giving up the benefits of syntax highlighting.
- corysama 10y ago
  I you are using an "Angry Fruit Salad" color scheme, like the example in the article, it's yer own damn fault for not investing 10 minutes to find something more sublime.
  - figgis 10y ago
    http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized Best color scheme I have found, I use it for everything. I can't even imagine opening up some of my code in notepad or vi(m) with no syntax highlighting and actually trying to do a productive amount of work. This suggestion seems absolutely ridiculous if your syntax highlighting is sane.
- pyre 10y ago
  > Most syntax highlighting uses extremely saturated clashing colors Really? Why is it then that we have such popularity in color schemes like Solarized[1]? Or the much older zenburn? I'll agree that there are a lot of bad color schemes out there, but that's because anyone can create a color scheme. There's no certification process to create one. Back in the era where people "themed" their window manager (GNOME, Kwin, Windows, and even OSX had hacks for this), look at all of the really gaudy window themes that were created. Is this an argument against all theming of windows? Is judicious use of Comic Sans an argument against fonts? Of course not. [1] http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized
geofft 10y ago
Every time I have accidentally started my editor without syntax highlighting due to a misconfiguration (e.g., the file doesn't have the right extension), it has impeded my understanding. I will take that experimental data over a pile of arguments from first principles any day.
- pyre 10y ago
  > anecdotal data Fixed that for you.
  - geofft 10y ago
    Why do you think I wrote that incorrectly?
Philipp__ 10y ago
I think that comparison between text and code is wrong! Totally! But maybe it depends how you experience code, it makes sense that it affects your preference to syntax highlighting. And I do not like how he took personal preference and tried to generalize it. If something works for you, doesn't mean it will work for everybody, nor that it can be scientifically true. I know what OP wanted to say, but I think we should stop with those deep minded subconscious thinkings that affect our code. I like syntax highlighting it, it helps me. Not some over the roof-rainbow colors, I always like minimal and dark color schemes, but I think it would definitely feel weird to code without syntax highlighting. Although I would get used to it. But if it ain't broken don't fix it.
- masterzora 10y ago
  I think comparing text and code actually makes perfect sense but you have to compare the right text. Pick up any reference book. A dictionary, a textbook, a phone book, whatever. Leaf through it a bit. You'll find they all use text formatting to highlight things. The dictionaries I've used typically use bold for a word and its different forms, italics for parts of speech, and such. Phone books similarly use different weights and sizes for names, addresses, and phone numbers. Textbooks use bold and italics to highlight important terms and concepts and students will often mark up the books to further highlight certain things. Code is usually not meant to be read like you would a novel; it's much more like a reference text. For me, at least, syntax highlighting is a tool that supports the ability to more easily find what I need and understand it in isolation. Maybe it would be slower for me to read a syntax-highlighted file token-by-token end-to-end than an un-highlighted one but that's not a use case I ever need.
  - Philipp__ 10y ago
    I have to agree with you on that! My bad that I didn't specify what kind of text I was refeering to! I thought of example that was provided in the post.
akurilin 10y ago
Definitely iconoclastic, but Linus is also insanely good at what he does, so I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss that position, there might be something there.
- joemi 10y ago
  But as many others have pointed out, his comparison between code and prose is completely absurd and shows a complete lack of understanding of what he's writing about. He's not actually writing about code, he's writing about both cognitive science and visual design, which I do not believe are his strengths.
jahewson 10y ago
Taking a guideline for prose and misapplying it to code does not result in a meaningful insight. Just look at non-prose typeset works such dictionaries, we often see a selection of different font styles there to help the reader scan non-linearly. Look also at newspapers, again we see different font styles, sizes and weights to help the user navigate a page. Look at the references section of an academic paper - you'll find bold italic and underline all used on the same line. Color is very expensive to use in printing prose and so is generally not used, but in handwritten medieval documents color was often used: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubric https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubric Also this claim isn't even correct - code which varies in color is not changing typeface! Really it's no different from using bold or italic in traditional prose, which nobody would complain about.
enqk 10y ago
The go creators use the Acme text editor which itself doesn't have syntax highlighting.
bww 10y ago
> One of the basic rules of thumb in typography is that, when writing a piece of text, you should choose one typeface and stick to it. Right, because prose text never uses more than one type size, treatment, or formatting to make the content easier to read.
bpchaps 10y ago
I learned to code without any sort of syntax highlighting or autocomplete features. Whenever I need to use an editor that has Features like syntax highlighting and autocompletion, my workflow actually slows down pretty substantially. The negatives just don't beat the positives for me. Why the negative comments with some folk even calling this guy wrong on an opinion piece? Sheesh, people..
elcapitan 10y ago
What people usually get wrong about text and typography is that there is not just one type of text, and therefore not just one type of typography. Dictionaries have different typography from recipe books, which are different from math books, which are different from newspapers and so on. So saying that source code should not have its own kind of typography because it wouldn't work for some other textform is like saying that encylopedias should be like novels because it would be silly if there were arrows in front of words in novels that appear somewhere else in the book.
Ultimatt 10y ago
Most of the time when you "read" code you explicitly want to parse form and skim over thousands of lines to get a gist of where to drill down. All the anti arguments on this article almost show a complete inverted understanding of common requirements.
Steeeve 10y ago
You can pry syntax highlighting away from my cold dead body. The author obviously hasn't spent much time coding.
- khedoros 10y ago
  > The author obviously hasn't spent much time coding. I take it that you didn't look through his list of projects. There are some impressive things listed.
stevebmark 10y ago
Not this again. "A case against traffic lights having colors. You should just pay more attention to what each dot means"
- gingerrr 10y ago
  This is the best pithy response to this argument I've seen, thanks. Can't wait to bust it out next time.
krabpaaltje 10y ago
The idea is that syntax highlighting frees up the brain from doing tedious things like analyzing syntax, to use them on a higher level. Less strain on the brain, so to speak.
chc 10y ago
This whole article appears to be based on a misunderstanding (or at least an idiosyncratic view) of typography. Varying styles within a work can be immensely helpful, and is almost universally done. For example, headers tend to be written bigger to indicate a) that they're something different from the main text, and b) what their relationship to the main text is. Similarly, italic and bold text are used to impart additional meaning to various parts of the text. Many publications will use a different style for things like bylines and photo captions — again, because they are different things from the body text and this helps the reader pick out the parts of the page in a purely visual manner. It's even common to see parts of the body text stylized differently to indicate that they have a special function — for example, in a Q&A format, you'll often see the questions formatted differently from answers, or the identities of the speakers might be written differently from the words they said. So not only is this philosophy about typography not necessarily applicable to code, it's not even widely accepted for ordinary written text.
hosh 10y ago
>Developing software is complex and error-prone, so people need to be thinking when doing it. And yeah, I realize that these opinions are controversial to some. I agree. However, I don't see how syntax highlighting necessarily makes reasoning code easier or harder. I don't know if the arguments are specious, but I think and feel that much of the arguments in the article are weak and unconvincing. The author has already dismissed (without examination) the strongest argument for syntax highlighting: aesthetics. There are whole philosophies of aesthetics that makes a lot of sense, but only when we go beyond the mere results of the programming. The aesthetic argument for syntax highlighting isn't for the sake of the quality of the resulting program but rather, the quality of the experience for the programmer. That in and of itself is underestimated by a fixation on the resulting code. There are philosophies that precisely define aesthetics, but these are generally in the non-dual philosophies, not the dualist philosophies. As soon as you have a dualist philosophy, you set up an opposition between privileging objective over subjective, or subjective over objective, and it resolves nothing. Non-dual philosophies do not privilege objective over subjective, or subjective over objective, and have a lot of useful, testable (empirical, experienceable) things to say about aesthetics. Aesthetics bring a human perspective to the technology and reminds us that, however efficient a technology is, it shapes and is in turn shaped by our experiences as human beings.
huherto 10y ago
I don't know if it helps me. But it is pretty. I like pretty things.
ebbv 10y ago
This is such a ridiculous statement I honestly believe it's clickbait and have flagged it as such. Syntax highlighting has so many obvious benefits that I think there's only two types of people who are against it; the first is people who just don't use it and use it as a silly point of pride that they don't and the second is people who are just trolling. While you're typing things get highlighted the correct color indicating your syntax is correct. For example, you aren't going to forget a quote to end a string (or start a string) if all your code gets highlighted the wrong color. This alone is enough to make it worthwhile even if syntax highlighting didn't do anything else. I'm not gonna waste a lot of time here listing out the numerous benefits of syntax highlight but instead make this point; the same dumb argument could be made against indentation. Why do you need to indent?! You should understand the code by reading it not based on indentation! Yeah, that's really stupid isn't it?
femto113 10y ago
Startled to read this, since I point to syntax highlighting as the single biggest boost to productivity since I started coding (back in the monochrome monitor years). Now coding without it feels like trying to play chess with non-Staunton pieces, there's an extra cognitive load that has nothing to do with the end goal.
- gingerrr 10y ago
  THIS! I'm shocked to see so few comments discussing the amount of mental overhead syntax highlighting helps you avoid. Without syntax highlighting, I have to keep the contextual meaning of every character I read in state mentally, and constantly update the mental map I have of the code. I have to actively parse every character. With syntax highlighting, the relationship of each token to the rest of the tokens around it is preserved, so that meaning is inferable rather than needing to be maintained in memory. I can scan and jump around between meaningful code anchors without having to read every line of code between. It's like getting to jump straight to the AST. To each their own, of course. I started programming without syntax highlighting and the switch made me a faster dev without question.
dang 10y ago
Some previous discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=A%20case%20against%20syntax%20highlighting&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=A%20case%20against%20syntax%20....
1_player 10y ago
I've always been on the lookout for a very simple syntax theme, very minimal, while the current trend is have as many colours as possible. Recently somebody posted microlight.js (https://asvd.github.io/microlight/ https://asvd.github.io/microlight/) which has exactly the type of colour theme I'm looking for. Only comments and strings are highlighted, anything else is the default font. So I've hacked together in 10 minutes a rough emacs theme, not satisfied yet, looks like this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/p41iw7r5p4dwd4w/Screenshot%202016-06-06%2016.46.48.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/p41iw7r5p4dwd4w/Screenshot%202016-... So my questions are: 1) Anyone know a good minimal theme for Emacs? 2) How do I change the emacs font lock for operators/braces? There only seems to be a hacky way to do it.
- pyre 10y ago
  > while the current trend is have as many colours as possible Current as opposed to what though? People have always created themes that work for some people, but not for others. I've even seen themes that used bold, underline and italics rather than color to "highlight" syntax.
kdeenanauth 10y ago
Syntax highlighting for fiction done right(er) - http://evanhahn.github.io/English-text-highlighting/ http://evanhahn.github.io/English-text-highlighting/
jrapdx3 10y ago
It's pretty common to look at code without highlighting, for example, in code snippets included with comments here on HN, or printed out on a terminal. Often it's not too difficult to understand in that circumstance, but it might well require more effort to grasp vs. syntax highlighted viewing. It suggests familiarity with the code is a crucial variable in determining the utility of highlighting or ability to get by without it. Like others I find highlighting useful for code editing, and agree with the implication that syntax plays a much bigger role in coding vs. reading non-code text. IOW semantics of code is obviously far more dependent on syntactic precision than in ordinary use of language. Finally, the universality of syntax highlighting in code editors is unlikely to be due to degenerate comprehension skills among programmers. Rather it's implicit evidence that highlighting provides substantial productivity benefit to code writers.
andremendes 10y ago
I'm honestly considering whether this article is not purposely trying to argue over a bogus premise only to later warn us to take what we read online with a grain of salt. I mean, to pose the question "why on earth would people want to highlighting verbs" as an attempt to prove that syntax highlighting is unnecessary is not even close to be a good try.
scotty79 10y ago
Douglas Crockford would prefer highlighting that would indicate from which scope the variable inside the closure comes from. So specific color for variables in specific scope that carries over to nested scopes where the variable is used.
veli_joza 10y ago
Technical books, dictionaries and similar structured texts consistently use syntax highlighting. Prose is very different from source code. Also, it seems to me that the author has bigger problem with the way syntax highlighting is implemented than the concept itself. I would agree there's much to be improved in syntax highlighting, in a way that would actually help programmer and draw attention to problematic constructs. This would require collaboration between editor and different tools, but it would be a good step forward I think.

29 points by jb1991 10y ago

ajkjk 10y ago

Apparently I'm supposed to believe "Perhaps syntax highlighting was invented to speed up the reading process. ... Well, no. One of the basic rules of thumb in typography is that, when writing a piece of text, you should choose one typeface and stick to it" and then believe the rest of the article. Well, I don't believe that part, since I experience the complete opposite every day. A silly typographical guideline doesn't affect my experience at all.

draw_down 10y ago

Semantics are more important than syntax, sure. But it doesn't matter what the semantics are if you screw up the syntax, which you will be more likely to do without syntax highlighting because you're a hairless ape. I just don't see an actual reason not to use it, but if you don't want to, knock yourself out I guess.

savanaly 10y ago

>Well, no. One of the basic rules of thumb in typography is that, when writing a piece of text, you should choose one typeface and stick to it. Likewise, a splash of colour may grab the reader's attention, but it will inevitably decrease the legibility of the text. The natural flow of the text is broken, and it takes more brain effort to piece together the individual letters into words and semantics. Cognitively, the reading process becomes slightly less automatic and slightly more conscious; leaving less room in the conscious part of the mind for actually understanding the text. That might be true for text, but I don't read code at all the way I read prose. I highly doubt i've ever read more then four or five lines of code in a row without my eye jumping to other parts of the function, forward to the next part to understand why variables are being set up, or backwards to remember when such variable was defined, or jumping to the big picture to remember how this function or that fits into the overall program. Syntax highlighting is enormously helpful to my eye when reading in that manner.

bpchaps 10y ago
Yes, and that's your opinion. Not mine. Not his. It's an opinion piece, but you and just about everyone in this thread is writing as if their opinion is a fact that trumps his opinion. Stop that :(. Edit: Why the downvotes? Are different opinions really that bad?
- acbabis 10y ago
  Except the article is not an opinion piece. The author makes a factual claim that removing syntax highlighting makes the code ironically easier to read. That's something that could be measured and either confirmed or refuted in a lab.
  - bpchaps 10y ago
    For some of us, syntax highlighting DOES make code more difficult to read. We're all different. I learned most of what I know on a Solaris 9 machine on a CRT with a model m back in 2008 with zero syntax highlighting, in vi and without vim. Zero fluff. I've tried syntax highlighting, but every time I do, I end up going back and my code quality and readability improves. I imagine a similar effect would happen to others if their colors were changed to incredibly tacky colors.
- Nadya 10y ago
  >Do you rely on syntax highlighting when developing software? If so, you may be shooting yourself in the foot. In this post, I will argue that syntax highlighting, while aesthetically seductive, moves focus from content to form, and discourages those who look at the code from trying to understand it. The very first opening line is an argument against syntax highlighting. Arguments (at least, of this sort) should be based on facts or studies, or at least logical reasoning and it is not introduced as an opinion piece, but an argument. I only gave the article a glance and I take two issues with it. >Syntax highlighting applied to fiction. It's easy to spot all the verbs, but why on Earth would you want to do that? I wouldn't need to for English, however I can think of a situation where I'd like to see the difference between an int '5' and a string '5' at a glance. In fact - that sort of bug isn't all that uncommon in languages that aren't hard typed. >[misguided piano teachers, yellow keys]...but do they honestly believe that children are unable to learn note names? They will have to, eventually, and then they will have to un-learn the colours. This argues like a case against mnemonics as learning devices. Mnemonics are an entire memory trick designed to be "un-learned" by the learner. Planet names aren't difficult to learn but a sentence like "Mercury Viewed Earth’s Many Aspects Joyfully Sitting Under Neptune" sure makes the order from the sun easier to remember. Mnemonics are a pretty well-research thing and they work [0]. Most people who want to compete in memory contests rely on using them. My favorite example is the Major System [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system

joslin01 10y ago

> It's easy to spot all the verbs, but why on Earth would you want to do that? The big difference between genuine reading and coding is the variability of scanning / focus. When you read, you usually want to take it all in -- it wouldn't make sense to jump around because it's a single, linear journey. Code does not observe this rule, so the more experience you get as a coder, the better scanner you become. You quickly view a class and think "ah yes yes.. it's _roughly_ doing this.. that" -- you sure as heck don't read the whole thing carefully word by word! The best coders are amazing scanners -- capable of pointing out a missing parenthesis in a sea of parenthesis. This argument against syntax highlighting is like taking the batteries outta our flashlight. Sure, we'd be more careful but our productivity would surely suffer.

oconnore 10y ago
I've been working without highlighting for ~6 months, and I've gotten faster at scanning, not slower. Feel free to keep doing what you're doing, but making assumptions about workflows that you're unwilling to try is not helpful or convincing.
- joslin01 10y ago
  I want you to know this comment is every bit as subjective and "not helpful / convincing" as you think mine is except mine had deductive reasoning -- yours is just anecdotal. I only been coding for 10 years, so maybe some veterans who been coding since the 70s can share their experience and we can weigh it against yours. I also question that you indeed are a faster scanner. Here's a specific example I wonder if your scanning would win out on -- Xcode turns internal Cocoa classes blue whereas your own classes are green. You quickly know what you coded and what you didn't. Not helpful? Should already know? I wonder if you inherited someone else's code base if you would enjoy the green immediate feedback rather than the inference you would otherwise have to take.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- 10y ago

nikki-9696 10y ago

I'll keep it, thanks. My life is far easier with it. You are welcome to use Notepad.

bpchaps 10y ago
Ever use vi/emacs/nano/etc? Pretty sure not everybody who doesn't like syntax highlighting only uses notepad ;).
- charonn0 10y ago
  Don't vi and emacs support syntax highlighting? ^Ocomment.txt^X
  - pyre 10y ago
    nano supports syntax highlighting, IIRC. Not sure if pico does. If you're a fan of Motif you could even used Nedit.
  - bpchaps 10y ago
    Yeah, but claiming that zero syntax highlighting automatically implies Notepad is pretty ridiculous. Does vi support it, though? I know vim does.
  - figgis 10y ago
    vi and emacs certainly support syntax highlighting. Nano does as well. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19444340/how-to-specify-syntax-highlighting-in-vi-editor http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19444340/how-to-specify-s... In fact the only text editors that I know of off the top of my head that do not support syntax highlighting is notepad and pico.

dahart 10y ago

Heh. The example of highlighting = vs == different just proves the value of syntax highlighting for me. Misspelling keywords is the same thing, a highlighting (or lack thereof) can alert you to the fact that you flubbed the spelling, and save you from a compile or runtime error. Programming language keywords are different than English verbs. If you misspell keywords, your program will fail, but if you misspell a verb in an essay, nothing catastrophic happens, most of the time. It does take me longer to read code in an uncolored ssh window than in Sublime with syntax highlighting, that's true. And I agree that semantics are more important than syntax. But I'm not sure I buy that having highlighting makes reading colored code slower than it would be otherwise. The case here didn't present evidence that it's worse. It might be a crutch, but it's also possible that the reason reading uncolored code is slower is because having syntax highlighting is actually better than not having it.

nv-vn 10y ago
Misspelling a keyword is a low-cost issue. The compiler will point it out to you immediately, and compilers are very fast these days. Nothing happening here is very catastrophic.
- sp332 10y ago
  Not all languages are compiled.
- pyre 10y ago
  What happens when your compile step takes a full minute to complete? Sure it's only a minute lost, but it also breaks your flow.
- dahart 10y ago
  Having a compile fail is catastrophic, not in the sense of the amount of effort it takes to fix, but in the sense that the computer has completely rejected your input. Your compile or execution failed. It won't work without change. Misspelling English doesn't usually cause a complete failure, or force you to try again, that's my point. The example in the essay was a cute comparison that I think actually is worth considering, but is ultimately comparing apples to oranges. But, no matter how fast your compiler is, the cost of finding and fixing a mis-spelling in your editor with syntax highlighting is much less expensive than finding them and fixing them with a compiler or by executing the program. Could be a few seconds per typo less expensive, but my professional experience has generally involved builds that take 1-10 minutes. I'll take the syntax highlighting crutch over waiting for my compiler to fail.

jasode 10y ago

copypaste of my previous comment about this: I've not found the Alice-in-Wonderland analogy colorizing the "verbs" to be convincing. With human language like English, we learn it and use it without the formal grammar++. A 5-year old child can speak to her mother ("I want some candy!") without conscious knowledge of "verbs" or "nouns". A formal grammar for categorization is what we layer on top of language for analysis in school. Two people can communicate and understand each other without any exposure to any grammar lessons. So yes, colorizing verbs looks superfluous and noisy.[2] On the other hand, computer programming syntax starts with grammar. You learn that certain specific tokens are "data types" and other tokens are "literals", etc, etc. And that grammar categorization in programming languages never goes away as you're typing out new code. (Otherwise, you'd get a compiler error or unintended behavior because x="3"+"5" with quotes ("35") means something different from x=3+5 without quotes (8).) This is why so many experienced programmers find color highlighting helpful even if they've been programming that language for 10+ years. Sure we want to focus on higher cognitive purpose of "semantics" but the grammar is deeply intertwined with reconstructing what the semantics is. A closer analogy of color highlighting in a different realm would be different colors in TCPIP traces such as "red" highlighting external ip addresses. This can be helpful for forensics of malware phoning home. Or in financials dashboards where uptrends are "green" and downtrends are "red". The same reasons that colors help the malware analyst or stock trader quickly parse data at a glance is also how it helps programmers. ++ (at least not consciously that a 5-year old would be self-aware of it. A theory of innate universal grammar in the brain by Chomsky isn't what I'm talking about.) [2] except for rare examples of using annotation or coloring of verbs to help parse sentences like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...

pbreit 10y ago

For me syntax highlighting is almost exclusively to reveal my syntax errors and in that respect is a godsend. This article doesn't resonate with me at all.

btilly 10y ago

I understand the spirit, but it is wrong. Syntax highlighting is helpful to me for the following purposes. 1. Scanning through code. 2. Making it clear what is a comment, what is a string, and what is code. 3. Catching a variety of minor syntax errors automatically. (For example failing to properly close a multi-line quote...) 4. When switching languages, reminding me when I didn't fully switch gears and wound up using the wrong keyword. I learned to program in vi without syntax highlighting. Before I tried syntax highlighting, I thought it was silly. After I tried it, I found it made for a more comfortable environment. The difference isn't huge, but it is noticeable enough that now I always turn it on.

hosh 10y ago
I have a similar experience. I learned to program as a kid with BASIC (no editor). I learned to read code while I was young because I was too lazy to type the BASIC games found in magazines, so it was easier to parse the game and play it in my mind. I cut my teeth on the MudOS platform, using the in-game `ed` to for rewriting backend code. I didn't use syntax highlighting for a long time. There are times when I log into a system to edit something with vim, and no syntax highlighting appears. It surprises me, but not a deal-breaker. I also thought syntax highlighting was unnecessary. The first time I saw a video of using the Twilight theme for Sublime, I was stunned by what the colors brought out. At that time, my awareness was not as developed, so I couldn't even tell you I liked it because of how I experienced the code. So I spent a lot of time finding good themes for my editors, first vim and now spacemacs. If I am going to look at code all day, I don't want my eyes to bleed. Aesthetics is the strongest argument I have for syntax highlighting, and it should not be casually dismissed without investigation.
- btilly 10y ago
  Aesthetics matters a lot. Here is a simple example. Light text on a dark background tends to be more readable, but may depress some people. Dark text on a light background is the opposite. It sounds stupid, but it matters.

panic 10y ago

I think there's a middle ground here. Most syntax highlighting uses extremely saturated clashing colors. The feeling you get for the "texture" of the code is useful, but it can make the code hard to read all at once. Using a more toned-down theme brings back some of that legibility without giving up the benefits of syntax highlighting.

corysama 10y ago
I you are using an "Angry Fruit Salad" color scheme, like the example in the article, it's yer own damn fault for not investing 10 minutes to find something more sublime.
- figgis 10y ago
  http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized Best color scheme I have found, I use it for everything. I can't even imagine opening up some of my code in notepad or vi(m) with no syntax highlighting and actually trying to do a productive amount of work. This suggestion seems absolutely ridiculous if your syntax highlighting is sane.
pyre 10y ago
> Most syntax highlighting uses extremely saturated clashing colors Really? Why is it then that we have such popularity in color schemes like Solarized[1]? Or the much older zenburn? I'll agree that there are a lot of bad color schemes out there, but that's because anyone can create a color scheme. There's no certification process to create one. Back in the era where people "themed" their window manager (GNOME, Kwin, Windows, and even OSX had hacks for this), look at all of the really gaudy window themes that were created. Is this an argument against all theming of windows? Is judicious use of Comic Sans an argument against fonts? Of course not. [1] http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized

geofft 10y ago

Every time I have accidentally started my editor without syntax highlighting due to a misconfiguration (e.g., the file doesn't have the right extension), it has impeded my understanding. I will take that experimental data over a pile of arguments from first principles any day.

pyre 10y ago
> anecdotal data Fixed that for you.
- geofft 10y ago
  Why do you think I wrote that incorrectly?

Philipp__ 10y ago

I think that comparison between text and code is wrong! Totally! But maybe it depends how you experience code, it makes sense that it affects your preference to syntax highlighting. And I do not like how he took personal preference and tried to generalize it. If something works for you, doesn't mean it will work for everybody, nor that it can be scientifically true. I know what OP wanted to say, but I think we should stop with those deep minded subconscious thinkings that affect our code. I like syntax highlighting it, it helps me. Not some over the roof-rainbow colors, I always like minimal and dark color schemes, but I think it would definitely feel weird to code without syntax highlighting. Although I would get used to it. But if it ain't broken don't fix it.

masterzora 10y ago
I think comparing text and code actually makes perfect sense but you have to compare the right text. Pick up any reference book. A dictionary, a textbook, a phone book, whatever. Leaf through it a bit. You'll find they all use text formatting to highlight things. The dictionaries I've used typically use bold for a word and its different forms, italics for parts of speech, and such. Phone books similarly use different weights and sizes for names, addresses, and phone numbers. Textbooks use bold and italics to highlight important terms and concepts and students will often mark up the books to further highlight certain things. Code is usually not meant to be read like you would a novel; it's much more like a reference text. For me, at least, syntax highlighting is a tool that supports the ability to more easily find what I need and understand it in isolation. Maybe it would be slower for me to read a syntax-highlighted file token-by-token end-to-end than an un-highlighted one but that's not a use case I ever need.
- Philipp__ 10y ago
  I have to agree with you on that! My bad that I didn't specify what kind of text I was refeering to! I thought of example that was provided in the post.

akurilin 10y ago

Definitely iconoclastic, but Linus is also insanely good at what he does, so I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss that position, there might be something there.

joemi 10y ago
But as many others have pointed out, his comparison between code and prose is completely absurd and shows a complete lack of understanding of what he's writing about. He's not actually writing about code, he's writing about both cognitive science and visual design, which I do not believe are his strengths.

jahewson 10y ago

Taking a guideline for prose and misapplying it to code does not result in a meaningful insight. Just look at non-prose typeset works such dictionaries, we often see a selection of different font styles there to help the reader scan non-linearly. Look also at newspapers, again we see different font styles, sizes and weights to help the user navigate a page. Look at the references section of an academic paper - you'll find bold italic and underline all used on the same line. Color is very expensive to use in printing prose and so is generally not used, but in handwritten medieval documents color was often used: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubric https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubric Also this claim isn't even correct - code which varies in color is not changing typeface! Really it's no different from using bold or italic in traditional prose, which nobody would complain about.

enqk 10y ago

The go creators use the Acme text editor which itself doesn't have syntax highlighting.

bww 10y ago

> One of the basic rules of thumb in typography is that, when writing a piece of text, you should choose one typeface and stick to it. Right, because prose text never uses more than one type size, treatment, or formatting to make the content easier to read.

bpchaps 10y ago

I learned to code without any sort of syntax highlighting or autocomplete features. Whenever I need to use an editor that has Features like syntax highlighting and autocompletion, my workflow actually slows down pretty substantially. The negatives just don't beat the positives for me. Why the negative comments with some folk even calling this guy wrong on an opinion piece? Sheesh, people..

elcapitan 10y ago

What people usually get wrong about text and typography is that there is not just one type of text, and therefore not just one type of typography. Dictionaries have different typography from recipe books, which are different from math books, which are different from newspapers and so on. So saying that source code should not have its own kind of typography because it wouldn't work for some other textform is like saying that encylopedias should be like novels because it would be silly if there were arrows in front of words in novels that appear somewhere else in the book.

Ultimatt 10y ago

Most of the time when you "read" code you explicitly want to parse form and skim over thousands of lines to get a gist of where to drill down. All the anti arguments on this article almost show a complete inverted understanding of common requirements.

Steeeve 10y ago

You can pry syntax highlighting away from my cold dead body. The author obviously hasn't spent much time coding.

khedoros 10y ago
> The author obviously hasn't spent much time coding. I take it that you didn't look through his list of projects. There are some impressive things listed.

stevebmark 10y ago

Not this again. "A case against traffic lights having colors. You should just pay more attention to what each dot means"

gingerrr 10y ago
This is the best pithy response to this argument I've seen, thanks. Can't wait to bust it out next time.

krabpaaltje 10y ago

The idea is that syntax highlighting frees up the brain from doing tedious things like analyzing syntax, to use them on a higher level. Less strain on the brain, so to speak.

chc 10y ago

This whole article appears to be based on a misunderstanding (or at least an idiosyncratic view) of typography. Varying styles within a work can be immensely helpful, and is almost universally done. For example, headers tend to be written bigger to indicate a) that they're something different from the main text, and b) what their relationship to the main text is. Similarly, italic and bold text are used to impart additional meaning to various parts of the text. Many publications will use a different style for things like bylines and photo captions — again, because they are different things from the body text and this helps the reader pick out the parts of the page in a purely visual manner. It's even common to see parts of the body text stylized differently to indicate that they have a special function — for example, in a Q&A format, you'll often see the questions formatted differently from answers, or the identities of the speakers might be written differently from the words they said. So not only is this philosophy about typography not necessarily applicable to code, it's not even widely accepted for ordinary written text.

hosh 10y ago

>Developing software is complex and error-prone, so people need to be thinking when doing it. And yeah, I realize that these opinions are controversial to some. I agree. However, I don't see how syntax highlighting necessarily makes reasoning code easier or harder. I don't know if the arguments are specious, but I think and feel that much of the arguments in the article are weak and unconvincing. The author has already dismissed (without examination) the strongest argument for syntax highlighting: aesthetics. There are whole philosophies of aesthetics that makes a lot of sense, but only when we go beyond the mere results of the programming. The aesthetic argument for syntax highlighting isn't for the sake of the quality of the resulting program but rather, the quality of the experience for the programmer. That in and of itself is underestimated by a fixation on the resulting code. There are philosophies that precisely define aesthetics, but these are generally in the non-dual philosophies, not the dualist philosophies. As soon as you have a dualist philosophy, you set up an opposition between privileging objective over subjective, or subjective over objective, and it resolves nothing. Non-dual philosophies do not privilege objective over subjective, or subjective over objective, and have a lot of useful, testable (empirical, experienceable) things to say about aesthetics. Aesthetics bring a human perspective to the technology and reminds us that, however efficient a technology is, it shapes and is in turn shaped by our experiences as human beings.

huherto 10y ago

I don't know if it helps me. But it is pretty. I like pretty things.

ebbv 10y ago

This is such a ridiculous statement I honestly believe it's clickbait and have flagged it as such. Syntax highlighting has so many obvious benefits that I think there's only two types of people who are against it; the first is people who just don't use it and use it as a silly point of pride that they don't and the second is people who are just trolling. While you're typing things get highlighted the correct color indicating your syntax is correct. For example, you aren't going to forget a quote to end a string (or start a string) if all your code gets highlighted the wrong color. This alone is enough to make it worthwhile even if syntax highlighting didn't do anything else. I'm not gonna waste a lot of time here listing out the numerous benefits of syntax highlight but instead make this point; the same dumb argument could be made against indentation. Why do you need to indent?! You should understand the code by reading it not based on indentation! Yeah, that's really stupid isn't it?

femto113 10y ago

Startled to read this, since I point to syntax highlighting as the single biggest boost to productivity since I started coding (back in the monochrome monitor years). Now coding without it feels like trying to play chess with non-Staunton pieces, there's an extra cognitive load that has nothing to do with the end goal.

gingerrr 10y ago
THIS! I'm shocked to see so few comments discussing the amount of mental overhead syntax highlighting helps you avoid. Without syntax highlighting, I have to keep the contextual meaning of every character I read in state mentally, and constantly update the mental map I have of the code. I have to actively parse every character. With syntax highlighting, the relationship of each token to the rest of the tokens around it is preserved, so that meaning is inferable rather than needing to be maintained in memory. I can scan and jump around between meaningful code anchors without having to read every line of code between. It's like getting to jump straight to the AST. To each their own, of course. I started programming without syntax highlighting and the switch made me a faster dev without question.

dang 10y ago

Some previous discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=A%20case%20against%20syntax%20highlighting&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=A%20case%20against%20syntax%20....

1_player 10y ago

I've always been on the lookout for a very simple syntax theme, very minimal, while the current trend is have as many colours as possible. Recently somebody posted microlight.js (https://asvd.github.io/microlight/ https://asvd.github.io/microlight/) which has exactly the type of colour theme I'm looking for. Only comments and strings are highlighted, anything else is the default font. So I've hacked together in 10 minutes a rough emacs theme, not satisfied yet, looks like this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/p41iw7r5p4dwd4w/Screenshot%202016-06-06%2016.46.48.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/p41iw7r5p4dwd4w/Screenshot%202016-... So my questions are: 1) Anyone know a good minimal theme for Emacs? 2) How do I change the emacs font lock for operators/braces? There only seems to be a hacky way to do it.

pyre 10y ago
> while the current trend is have as many colours as possible Current as opposed to what though? People have always created themes that work for some people, but not for others. I've even seen themes that used bold, underline and italics rather than color to "highlight" syntax.

kdeenanauth 10y ago

Syntax highlighting for fiction done right(er) - http://evanhahn.github.io/English-text-highlighting/ http://evanhahn.github.io/English-text-highlighting/

jrapdx3 10y ago

It's pretty common to look at code without highlighting, for example, in code snippets included with comments here on HN, or printed out on a terminal. Often it's not too difficult to understand in that circumstance, but it might well require more effort to grasp vs. syntax highlighted viewing. It suggests familiarity with the code is a crucial variable in determining the utility of highlighting or ability to get by without it. Like others I find highlighting useful for code editing, and agree with the implication that syntax plays a much bigger role in coding vs. reading non-code text. IOW semantics of code is obviously far more dependent on syntactic precision than in ordinary use of language. Finally, the universality of syntax highlighting in code editors is unlikely to be due to degenerate comprehension skills among programmers. Rather it's implicit evidence that highlighting provides substantial productivity benefit to code writers.

andremendes 10y ago

I'm honestly considering whether this article is not purposely trying to argue over a bogus premise only to later warn us to take what we read online with a grain of salt. I mean, to pose the question "why on earth would people want to highlighting verbs" as an attempt to prove that syntax highlighting is unnecessary is not even close to be a good try.

scotty79 10y ago

Douglas Crockford would prefer highlighting that would indicate from which scope the variable inside the closure comes from. So specific color for variables in specific scope that carries over to nested scopes where the variable is used.

veli_joza 10y ago

Technical books, dictionaries and similar structured texts consistently use syntax highlighting. Prose is very different from source code. Also, it seems to me that the author has bigger problem with the way syntax highlighting is implemented than the concept itself. I would agree there's much to be improved in syntax highlighting, in a way that would actually help programmer and draw attention to problematic constructs. This would require collaboration between editor and different tools, but it would be a good step forward I think.