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A case against syntax highlighting
- informatimago 12y ago"Conclusions[...] Syntax highlighting doesn't improve legibility." Yes. And the author completely missed the point of syntax highlighting: it's not useful to read the code, it's useful to WRITE the code! It's when writing it that you want some early syntactic (and slight semantic) feedback. If you type a keyword and it highlight like a function name, you get a hint that you have a typo in your keyword. If you type a function name and it highlight as a type, or as an undefined token, you get the same hint. And so on. Just like automatic indentation of the code does provide you good syntactic hints about your parenthesizing (or brackets or begin/end etc), and let you notice at once when something's unbalanced or misplaced. (This is also the reason why python is bad: editors can't do automatic indentation of python code.)
- carlsmith 12y agoEditors can, and normally do, automatically indent Python.
- carlsmith 12y agoThis is a much stronger case against highlighting English and against using really nasty themes, which no one considered good ideas to begin with.