It seems like the takeaway is that you should use a well-designed syntax highlighting scheme. You cannot expect everybody reading your code to be using a good s

It seems like the takeaway is that you should use a well-designed syntax highlighting scheme. You cannot expect everybody reading your code to be using a good syntax highlighting scheme. Either way, I think code should be readable independent of editor features. I have noticed that, if you make code readable without syntax highlighting, it's always readable with syntax highlighting. The reverse is not true. I would even argue that the code readable without highlighting is more readable with highlighting than the code written just for highlighting. I don't use vertical alignment. I do think that a long list of vars is harder to read and vertical alignment helps with that. Yet, the solution for me is to attack the core problem. I reduce the number of moving parts inside a procedure, which you can be sure variables are. Perhaps the author should improve the trivial examples by showing the code with syntax highlighting and vertical alignment.