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Great article. As a side note, you might want to consider reformatting the blog post using syntax highlighting to make the code more readable and obvious. Thank
by VeejayRampay 14y ago
Great article. As a side note, you might want to consider reformatting the blog post using syntax highlighting to make the code more readable and obvious. Thanks for posting though.
- mseepgood 14y agohttp://kyleisom.net/blog/2012/10/17/syntax-off/ http://kyleisom.net/blog/2012/10/17/syntax-off/ Syntax highlighting is less common in the Go community since Rob Pike called syntax highlighting juvenile :D https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-nuts/hJHCAaiL0so/kG3BHV6QFfIJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-nuts/hJHCAaiL0so/kG3B... He also argued against keyword emphasizing: http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/pikestyle.html http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/pikestyle.html
- quadhome 14y agoThere's syntax highlighting and various other editor support installed with and included in the Go source tree: http://code.google.com/p/go/source/browse#hg%2Fmisc http://code.google.com/p/go/source/browse#hg%2Fmisc Rob Pike may have an issue with it, but the Go team most certainly does not.
- aroberge 14y agoColour can help carry information. It is a lot easier to identify strings if you use colours rather than just rely on seeing opening and beginning quotes. I know that I find it very useful - and even more so my choice of colours for comments making them blend more in the background and making it easier to forget. I would liken it to the use of boldface letters to represent matrices (or vectors) in some math textbook: without this convention, you have to rely a lot more on memory to know what each symbol represents. Mathematicians and physicists everywhere have found this to be useful. When you have a huge majority of programmers using syntax highlighting, you have to ask yourself if there is not an instrinsic value to its use and, if so, perhaps try to use it to communicate with the larger community, rather than adopting a cliquish practice.
- mseepgood 14y agoMy suspicion / theory is that most programmers turn on syntax highlighting for the same reason that they have desktop wallpapers: to make their lifes more colorful.
- cma 14y agoWhen your externally mandated build process is really slow, you appreciate things like easily noticing an unclosed quote, or a missing */ that was supposed to close a comment.
- Mr_T_ 14y agoOne of the main selling points of Go is that builds are fast.
- Mr_T_ 14y agoTo be honest, I often feel as if I was in a brothel on some blogs with CoffeeRubyNodeScript highlighting. (However, the choice of colors on this one isn't too good either)
- 14y ago
- jlgreco 14y agoHere is a pretty well-known essay against syntax highlighting: http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/syntaxhighlighting/index.php http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/syntaxhighlighting/i... Honestly, I've never bought it.
- shadowmint 14y ago... This is surely a minority view. Everyone uses syntax highlighting, for everything. for everything I can't honestly believe the whole go community just decided to by like, oh gee, well Rob doesn't like it, I gues we'll just ignore what everyone else is doing and do our own thing. For what it's worth, I use syntax highlighting in my go code, and so does http://tour.golang.org/ http://tour.golang.org/
- mseepgood 14y ago> Everyone uses syntax highlighting, for everything. for everything I guess I'm not the mainstream kind of guy then.
- VeejayRampay 14y agoAnd everyone uses it for a reason: color is one of the primary discriminators of human vision, it carries information efficiently and does it instantly, as clearly laid out in the Wikipedia article about visual search (pop-out effect) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_search http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_search It seems strange that Rob Pike would call it "infantile". I don't think it's very modern (nor mature) to say that either, since it completely ignores years of research done on the subject by scientists. But then again, to each his/her own.
- dchest 14y agoHe isn't arguing that highlighting doesn't carry more information. I think he's saying that it carries useless or wrong information.
- damian2000 14y agoFYI this just popped up on my twitter stream https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says/status/295712765149061121 https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says/status/295712765149061121
- zura 14y agoHis editor (Acme) doesn't support syntax highlighting, so his only choice (without abandoning Acme) is to call this an unimportant juvenile ;) You should really take it with a grain of salt.
- 4ad 14y agoHe wrote his own editor. It's not that acme doesn't happen to have syntax highlighting, it's that he explicitly decided against it.
- zenocon 14y agoThis was a polite way of saying that the blog is pretty darn unreadable. It really does hurt my eyes. Content sounded interesting, though.
- GlacJAY 14y agoYou can use something like Readability Bookmarklet or Readability Redux extension for chrome.
- bslatkin 14y agoMy blog is hideous, I know, I'm sorry about it.
- VeejayRampay 14y agoIt's not too bad :D I'd take content over form than the opposite any time of the day.