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I like to draw the comparison that in an alternate universe where the ASCII .txt file format had simply included a color byte with every letter byte, we'd now b
by phaedrus 2y ago
I like to draw the comparison that in an alternate universe where the ASCII .txt file format had simply included a color byte with every letter byte, we'd now be having coding format guidelines that also go into great detail prescribing manual syntax highlighting. The fact we don't and avoided endless bike shedding over syntax highlighting, instead leaving it to automatic tools and the presentation layer not the code itself, is purely an historical accident. Well, what does that say about other code formatting details which programmers currently do waste time manually doing and worrying about?
- pseudosavant 2y agoI had never considered the bikeshedding that would occur if there was a color byte… We struggle with spaces versus tabs, how many spaces, braces (or not), semi-colon (or not). It would definitely be the norm that there were languages that were dark or light mode, and both sides would be convinced they were right.
- mock-possum 2y agoThat one person who absolutely insists that enums are blue and everyone who can’t see it is a failure of a programmer
- philipov 2y agoI had never considered that, but you're absolutely right. I would totally be the sort of person to manually idiosyncratically syntax highlight my code if it were feasible. I'm sure glad I don't feel compelled to do that...
- masklinn 2y agoAn other option is to have the color be semantically significant in which case you can't idiosyncratically syntax highlight. That's what colorForth does. It's weird.
- zzo38computer 2y agoSome programming languages such as ColorForth require colours in order to work, that the meaning of a word depends on what colour it is written with.