> Syntax highlighting is juvenile. When I was a child, I was taught arithmetic using colored rods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisenaire_rods). I grew up and today I use monochromatic numerals.

https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/hJHCAaiL0so/m/kG3B...

What is childish is holding up one guy's editor preferences as a religious sacrament when 99.9% of your readers have different preferences.

That makes sense as a personal preference for him, but it's odd for that to still be the company/project stance. Like, surely he knows he's the minority for not wanting highlighting?

that's an extremely odd explanation and it makes me think that he has some hidden PTSD. it's also insane that one person's preference trumps the rest of the world's.

I understand and respect this position. I think syntax highlighting is a highly subjective matter, bordering on personal preference with regard to shell interactions, editor configurations, bindings, shortcuts, snippets, and the like. It's also... insignificant somehow, like quibbles over formatting rules that Go settled once and for all with `go fmt`.

I often prefer not to enable syntax highlighting just for color. Occasionally I'd choose some minimal theme that only highlights string literals and keywords. So it has two or three colors. But some of the color schemes I see are a festival of lights where every special element of syntax has its own color. I don't understand how that is supposed to help me parse anything and why the rules are complex. The `range` keyword needs to be purple, and `chan` must be navy blue. Why exactly? And every site has a different color scheme? There is no consensus, and there shouldn't be.

For a serious community-driven project like Go, dealing with the question of syntax highlighting is strange. The creators deliberately avoided the questions of IDEs and editors for Go, leaving them to the community. I think the same principle applies here.