31–40 of 48 posts
> "The best way I can describe it is to compare it to reading a book. When I read a book, I don't want parts of speech highlighted in different colours. What I want to do is to read the book, to take in the information."
I would love to try reading a book with the same support. Nouns in red and adverbs in green. It would be fantastic! So much passive information available… Now I think I know what my next weekend project is.
"When I read a book, I don't want parts of speech highlighted in different colours" I do! In long conversations in novels I occasionally lose track of who is currently talking; normally it's really obvious as the next page of text doesn't make any sense until I backtrack to find where the speech got switched, though one time I finished a whole book where my protagonist had the wrong gender because I didn't realise th…
Perhaps the actual story narrative needs to be clearer, by repeating the speaker's name more often.
Syntax highlighting is our engineered Synesthesia. > "The best way I can describe it is to compare it to reading a book. When I read a book, I don't want parts of speech highlighted in different colours. What I want to do is to read the book, to take in the information." I would love to try reading a book with the same support. Nouns in red and adverbs in green. It would be fantastic! So much passive information avai…
Here is another popular article about not using syntax highlighting. http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/syntaxhighlighting/ I still think it is nutty.
My synthesis of the acme/plan9 folks and the mainstream is that color can be useful in an environment, but the way it's currently used is not. Like this guy points out, there's no point highlighting language keywords; we're just doing it because it's easy to do so. Rather conserve the color and our attention for when it's truly needed. But the need for color seems too strong to fight with pure rationality. Perhaps it…
Yes, highlighting language keywords is like capitalizing or bolding the unstressed words in English:
THERE IS A book ABOUT programming ON THE table.Once you're used to the lack of color, go all the way and use a proportional font.
Personally I program Clojure, so there's not a lot of syntax to highlight--well, more than in scheme, for example--but I couldn't imagine life without brace matching (a dynamic kind of syntax highlighting).
> When I read a book, I don't want parts of speech highlighted in different colours Books don't have syntax highlighting, but having never read a book that does, I can't say one way or the other that it is a terrible idea. And actually, as I think about it more, books would be a nicer reading experience if conversations were highlighted, and if key person/place names where in a different color. (Just like text in RPG…
As a personal note, the first time I read it, I didn't realize that the colors were significant for a couple of chapters because, for some reason, I occasionally perceive black text on paper as being red, and thus it took me a while to realize that this text actually was printed in red.
Here is another popular article about not using syntax highlighting. http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/syntaxhighlighting/ I still think it is nutty.
My synthesis of the acme/plan9 folks and the mainstream is that color can be useful in an environment, but the way it's currently used is not. Like this guy points out, there's no point highlighting language keywords; we're just doing it because it's easy to do so. Rather conserve the color and our attention for when it's truly needed. But the need for color seems too strong to fight with pure rationality. Perhaps it…
Disagree, it helps confirm you typed it correctly when you are trying to, and that you've named something incompatibly when you aren't. Thereby very likely preventing syntax/name errors before they happen.
"How I stopped [perfectly fine activity]... And why you should, too."
I've no problem with syntax highlighting as a concept, but invariably it's only designed for white or black terminal. If you need to use something else, like light gray, then certain colours of elements disappear due to low contrast. Much like the colour output of ls; beautiful on black, largely invisible on anything else.
This is what my code looked like:
// Initialise
for (i=0;iAnything that can increase the chance to catch an error is a good thing.
[EDITED for code formatting.]