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http://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 Ro

http://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 ago
There'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 ago
Colour 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 ago
  My 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 ago
    When 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 ago
      One of the main selling points of Go is that builds are fast.
      - LeafStorm 14y ago
        That doesn't make failed builds any less frustrating. Heck, in Python, you don't even have builds, but getting a SyntaxError on import is still frustrating.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - jlgreco 14y ago
        And syntax highlighting is even faster..
      - pjmlp 14y ago
        Like most languages with modules.
  - Mr_T_ 14y ago
    To 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)
  - flogic 14y ago
    That's a perfectly valid reason in and of itself.
  - alangpierce 14y ago
    Good language-aware syntax highlighters do a lot more than highlight keywords and other syntactic things, and can make code more readable in a nontrivial way. For example, Eclipse's Java editor will color things differently based on the scope you pull it from, which lets you distinguish local variables, non-static fields, static fields, and inherited fields. It does a similar thing for method invocations, including a strikethrough for methods marked as deprecated. This saves having to manually go to a bunch of definitions in order to get the proper context when reading code you're not familiar with.
- jimbokun 14y ago
  "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." This is an excellent comparison, as programming languages probably have more in common with mathematical notation than natural language prose.
jlgreco 14y ago
Here 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.
  - Mr_T_ 14y ago
    I even use proportional font for coding.
    - 4ad 14y ago
      Yup. Monospace fonts are only an artefact of typewriters.
- VeejayRampay 14y ago
  And 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 ago
    He isn't arguing that highlighting doesn't carry more information. I think he's saying that it carries useless or wrong information.
damian2000 14y ago
FYI 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 ago
His 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 ago
  He wrote his own editor. It's not that acme doesn't happen to have syntax highlighting, it's that he explicitly decided against it.

quadhome 14y ago

There'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 ago

Colour 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 ago
My 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 ago
  When 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 ago
    One of the main selling points of Go is that builds are fast.
    - LeafStorm 14y ago
      That doesn't make failed builds any less frustrating. Heck, in Python, you don't even have builds, but getting a SyntaxError on import is still frustrating.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      And syntax highlighting is even faster..
    - pjmlp 14y ago
      Like most languages with modules.
- Mr_T_ 14y ago
  To 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)
- flogic 14y ago
  That's a perfectly valid reason in and of itself.
- alangpierce 14y ago
  Good language-aware syntax highlighters do a lot more than highlight keywords and other syntactic things, and can make code more readable in a nontrivial way. For example, Eclipse's Java editor will color things differently based on the scope you pull it from, which lets you distinguish local variables, non-static fields, static fields, and inherited fields. It does a similar thing for method invocations, including a strikethrough for methods marked as deprecated. This saves having to manually go to a bunch of definitions in order to get the proper context when reading code you're not familiar with.
jimbokun 14y ago
"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." This is an excellent comparison, as programming languages probably have more in common with mathematical notation than natural language prose.

jlgreco 14y ago

Here 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.
- Mr_T_ 14y ago
  I even use proportional font for coding.
  - 4ad 14y ago
    Yup. Monospace fonts are only an artefact of typewriters.
VeejayRampay 14y ago
And 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 ago
  He isn't arguing that highlighting doesn't carry more information. I think he's saying that it carries useless or wrong information.

damian2000 14y ago

FYI 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 ago

His 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 ago
He wrote his own editor. It's not that acme doesn't happen to have syntax highlighting, it's that he explicitly decided against it.