The stance coupled with the garish background colour reminds me of how Pike also had a very dismissive view of using colours for syntax highlighting, and then later opened up about having a kind of colourblindness.
Both of them also seem to mean colour when they write syntax highlighting. That’s just one typographic tool among many. We also use bold, italics, underline, and even whitespace to highlight programming syntax. We could write a lot of programming languages as if they were prose, but we don’t. People hate that and call it “minified code”.
Humans also have a great capacity for colour vision, much better than most mammals. Some of us are even tetrachromats. Our colour vision is basically a free channel of information: It’s always on; we don’t have to concentrate to be able to discern most colours. When things in nature are more colourful than usual, like leaves in fall or a colourful sunset, we don’t find it tiresome; we find it refreshing and seek it out. But when our built environment becomes all shades of grey, we tend to find it depressing.
But humans are also different in many ways here. Better or worse colour vision is one thing, but some are also prone to getting overstimulated; others require more than average stimuli. We have great selective attention as a species, but again, individuals vary. There’s no one syntax highlighting that works for everyone.
Ultimately we should just find some syntax highlighting that we find generally pleasant, and then stick with it until we reflexively use the information carried in those colours. Use habit formation for our benefit.
Tonsky may enjoy his garish background colour and have found a mushy colourscheme that works for him, but he’s also way off base in his assessment of colourschemes in general.
Honestly, thought this would be the only thing that people would talk about. I can’t bring myself to seriously read a blog post about syntax highlighting when presented with such a horrendous color scheme. I usually just dive right into firefox reader because 99% of the web is shit, and I guess I did only to look for some callout to the irony or trolling… “Yellow for comments” And I’m still not convinced it’s not trolling.
The stance coupled with the garish background colour reminds me of how Pike also had a very dismissive view of using colours for syntax highlighting, and then later opened up about having a kind of colourblindness.
Both of them also seem to mean colour when they write syntax highlighting. That’s just one typographic tool among many. We also use bold, italics, underline, and even whitespace to highlight programming syntax. We could write a lot of programming languages as if they were prose, but we don’t. People hate that and call it “minified code”.
Humans also have a great capacity for colour vision, much better than most mammals. Some of us are even tetrachromats. Our colour vision is basically a free channel of information: It’s always on; we don’t have to concentrate to be able to discern most colours. When things in nature are more colourful than usual, like leaves in fall or a colourful sunset, we don’t find it tiresome; we find it refreshing and seek it out. But when our built environment becomes all shades of grey, we tend to find it depressing.
But humans are also different in many ways here. Better or worse colour vision is one thing, but some are also prone to getting overstimulated; others require more than average stimuli. We have great selective attention as a species, but again, individuals vary. There’s no one syntax highlighting that works for everyone.
Ultimately we should just find some syntax highlighting that we find generally pleasant, and then stick with it until we reflexively use the information carried in those colours. Use habit formation for our benefit.
Tonsky may enjoy his garish background colour and have found a mushy colourscheme that works for him, but he’s also way off base in his assessment of colourschemes in general.
Honestly, thought this would be the only thing that people would talk about. I can’t bring myself to seriously read a blog post about syntax highlighting when presented with such a horrendous color scheme. I usually just dive right into firefox reader because 99% of the web is shit, and I guess I did only to look for some callout to the irony or trolling… “Yellow for comments” And I’m still not convinced it’s not trolling.