alt Hacker NewsI will always yap to anyone who will listen that I think syntax highlighting was a mistake that has cost humanity untold millions of productivity hours. I only highlight comments to distinguish code from not-code, I think everything else is a pretty distraction. Note how nobody ever got the idea to apply syntax highlighting to English or any other natural language, whether in books or on forums. I could believe syntax highlighting helps learn to distinguish things when you're new to programming, but for experienced readers syntax parsing happens as automatically as it does in natural language without any need of colors.
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The article touches upon this:
> Unlike prose, where you usually read it linearly, with code you bounce around based on what connected elements you are exploring.
The moment you are jumping around a lot while reading, being able to understand the structure quickly becomes a major help. For example, dictionaries will have the words in a bold font while italicizing things like the plural etc.
> Note how nobody ever got the idea to apply syntax highlighting to English or any other natural language
Yes they have? It's a fairly common method of teaching children sentence structure.
Pedagogy aside, take a look at what books looked like before the printing press.
> for experienced readers syntax parsing happens as automatically as it does in natural language without any need of colors.
If you're reading slowly, yes. The colours help you skim-read.
Why do you feel the need to intentionally hobble yourself? The human eyes can take in a spectacular amount of visual information at a glance, using colour, texture, shape and so on to instantly classify and identify things.
Decades of visual design research have proven that colours and shapes improve understanding and you're using a device capable of complex and rich information display, but you want it to look like a book because ..?