

A case against syntax highlighting - jwdunne
http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/syntaxhighlighting/

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informatimago
"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
Editors can, and normally do, automatically indent Python.

------
carlsmith
This is a much stronger case against highlighting English and against using
really nasty themes, which no one considered good ideas to begin with.

