9 ms·

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 color

• 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.