alt Hacker News> try to remember what color your color theme uses for class names?
While I overall agree with the point of this post and the post being cited, I disagree with the premise that you need to be able to actively recall facts like this. The theme I personally use is quite toned down, but it does use different colors for variables, keywords, arguments, type names, and a few other classes of tokens. I don’t consciously think “hmm, what color is an argument” to look for those in my code - I just see them, have learned them over the years, and it’s muscle memory at this point, and helps me read the code. Just like I can’t remember the code to my apartment building, yet I type it in multiple times every day.
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> have learned them over the years
Well I guess that’s the difference? I personally change themes many times per day depending on my mood and the lighting conditions, and probably go through at least a few dozen themes in a year.
I don’t need to memorize colors either though, I look for differences in colors not absolute colors.
> I disagree with the premise that you need to be able to actively recall facts like this
Same. The goal is to differentiate things. I code mostly in Clojure and I love functional code, so the one thing that really stands out is anything that does mutable things: for example there's swap! in Clojure and that one is "bold fluo blue on a near dark background". I don't use it often, so it sticks out like a sore thumb. But I don't need to remember which hexcode I used for the fluorescent blue: I just know it's obvious.
Same for "rainbow parentheses": it helps visually see where the matching closing parenthesis is without needing to put the cursor on the opening parenthesis (which I can do too if I want).
My color code is mostly toned down too.
> Just like I can’t remember the code to my apartment building, yet I type it in multiple times every day.
To me it's even less problematic than this. Not being able to remember important codes except via muscle memory is quite unsettling for me because every now and again my muscle memory fails. Like I will get to an ATM and think "wait - what is my PIN?".
With syntax highlighting, even if my muscle memory fails me I still benefit from syntax highlighting (I think). Because I can immediately see the structure of each line. If I am looking through code for a particular thing, I will probably be able to disregard entire lines because they obviously don't have the structure I am looking for. And even within a line, I can just look at the beginning of each "span", immediately know if it's what I'm looking for, and skip to the next span if it's not.