A case against syntax highlighting(linusakesson.net)
linusakesson.net
A case against syntax highlighting
http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/syntaxhighlighting/
2 comments
Editors can, and normally do, automatically indent Python.
This is a much stronger case against highlighting English and against using really nasty themes, which no one considered good ideas to begin with.
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.)