Re:The Definitive Guide to Syntax Highlighting
by seanmcdirmid on Sunday September 28, 2014 @05:36AM
(#8379312)
Syntax highlighting is just a tool to eke out a few points of productivity in reading code. I know many people prefer plain text, notepad-style, but some of us like reading typeset documents where formatting (bolding, color, lines) is applied to make the document structure more pronounced.
I think much of it has to do with your attitude toward typography: do you view it as being utterly pointless and devoid of value, or do you like things that don't look like featureless crap.
I think much of it has to do with your attitude towards programming languages and source code: do you view them as being intrinsically difficult and thus requiring special tools to handle, or think that they're not any harder than human languages to work with (after having learned and used them extensively) so it feels completely natural to read un-highlighted code like you would text in a human language?
Looking at the rest of his site, you'll find that he has done an incredible amount of other interesting things too, which does increase the credibility of his argument - he doesn't use syntax highlighting, because he doesn't need it to understand his code.