

:syntax off - stock_toaster
http://www.kyleisom.net/blog/2012/10/17/syntax-off/

======
saurik
Many of the same arguments would apply equally well to removing whitespace and
punctuation from natural language, something that many people today in some
(even large) cultures--and certainly those living a thousand years ago who
spoke many of the dominant languages at the time--would describe using "don't
want". Color is just another axis along which information can be communicated
to you, one similar to using bold fonts to indicate "this is a keyword" (which
many textbooks do) or italics to mean "this is important" (which many articles
do) or different fonts to indicate "this was block quoted from a typed
document" (which many books do). It would actually be kind of interesting to
set off proper nouns in a special color (and in fact some languages do this,
both human and machine, using capitalized first letters), or to highlight
pronouns in colors that matched their references (to make random access
scanning in fiction books faster and easier). If the colors aren't working for
you, you might want to figure out how color could be better applied to your
problem, but throwing it out entirely is just having fun accepting and working
around the challenge of a handicap: next you might try removing language
features such as "classes" or even "functions/procedures" from your
experience, as "real programmers" do not need these distractions and without
them you will probably spend more time paying close attention to your control
flow. (In fact, while that sounds silly, spending a few months coding in
nothing but assembly language is actually quite mind-opening.) (Also, FWIW,
Rob Pike--the inspiration for this article--actually makes arguments similar
to this for why Go is a great language: that by having fewer features, people
will make less mistakes... very similar to the reasons why people designed
Java as limiting as it is, and why thousands of developers insist on using C
instead of C++ or assembly instead of C.) (<\- All of this typed without the
usage of paragraph breaks, as I'm certain that without them people just pay
more attention to the argument structure ;P.)

~~~
stock_toaster
I think the difference with your example of bold and italic text is different
because they are occasional, so they are more signal than noise. They stand
out as different because they are.

I see quite a few color themes where everything seems to be a different color
-- the signal of color almost gets lost in the noise.

So I think I disagree with the author of the linked article to the extent he
takes it. However, the article has made me wonder if a much simpler color
scheme that highlighted strings and syntax errors only, would be a bit more
straightforward and more signal than noise.

------
ollysb
I'm not sure I buy this. Reading a book for example, you always read a book
linearly. When I'm reading code I'm looking for different details at different
times, I'm doing a lot of scanning. Sometimes it's functions, other times
variables, strings etc. but being able to scan only items in a particular
colour really speeds up my search. Syntax highlighting really helps with this.

I'm also not sure about the idea of trying to hold more code in your head.
Over the last few years I've changed my practices so that I don't have to hold
much information in my head. For me this is one of the key benefits of TDD for
example. At this point I find context switching easy to do because I've
externalised the majority of my process to tools and practices.

If anything, good syntax highlighting makes code a real pleasure to read.
Coming from java/eclipse(stock scheme) to ruby/textmate(vibrant ink) I was
struck by how much I preferred reading the code in the bold colours of vibrant
ink. Going back to java seemed dreary by comparison.

