Personally I can't say when I was last actually aware of syntax highlighting. The only time I'm actively engaged with it is to change the default low contrast comment color that a lot of themes have (for some reason, as if comments are unimportant / noise) to something better. For Go, I don't really notice when it has or doesn't have syntax highlighting, at least not on e.g. go's website.
I don't know why it's still like that but that's the original reasoning.
https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/hJHCAaiL0so/m/kG3B...
> Gofmt was written to reduce the number of pointless discussions about code formatting. It succeeded admirably. I'm sad to say it had no effect whatsoever on the number of pointless discussions about syntax highlighting, or as I prefer to call it, spitzensparken blinkelichtzen.
> When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things.
I sincerely hope Rob Pike was being sarcastic/ironic, because otherwise, he sounds insufferable
Oh come on, I like syntax highlights, but this is not "insufferable". It's just opinions expressed strongly, with probably some tounge-in-cheek
The reason traffic lights are colored is because they are showing distinct states of the same thing and the color is the means of differentiating.
Same for transit maps: different routes are colored to distinguish them from other routes, which is especially useful if they overlap.
But that’s not what syntax highlighting does.
The equivalent of your examples would be to not highlight the syntax at all, but only use color coding to distinguish variables.
The equivalent of how syntax highlighting currently works for your examples would be if the light fixture was one color, and the light pole was another, but then all the actual lights were the same color.
I actually think highlighting only the variables with distinct colors could be extremely valuable. Would certainly help avoid mistakes with nested i/j loop counters.
Edit to add: come to think of it, it would have been even more valuable in Go, until recently anyway. The variable color coding would expose the common loop variable instance bugs, because a programmer would be instantly puzzled by the unexpected coloring.
Despite its huge size and it installing several services that constantly run in the background, it's still one of my favorite "languages" of all time. It's the only one I've ever seen people going from never having programmed before to making simple but meaningful contributions in within a single day.
I wonder if traffic lights were invented today, would it be just one light changing colour?
In any case, my analogy was not perfect, but neither was Russ's! The point is it's totally normal and not "childish" to use colours to help distinguish things. Traffic lights do not technically need colours (you can use the position of the lights - I assume that's what badly colourblind people do). Nor do transit maps technically need colours - you could just label the lines, or use patterns.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/gywst/1407078279
It's completely absurd to say that colours are childish because they can help children.
> Gofmt's style is no one's favorite, yet gofmt is everyone's favorite.
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.
Exactly. This is fundamentally about accessibility (in the broadest sense). Do people have opinionated screenreader settings they like to force on others too?
I wonder if the Go fonts has been created just to get a trademark on the "Go" word...
It's more likely that they don't feel the need to use the font they gave you (for your code editor) on code samples on their own web pages. As it's a custom font, the text would be susceptible to pop-in, or would visibly switch from one font to another, both of which are ugly.
Their CSS says this:
#blog .Article[data-slug='/blog/go-fonts'] code {
font-family: 'Go Mono', monospace;
}
#blog pre,
#blog code {
font-family: monospace;
}
I think the lack of syntax highlighting was one reason for that. It makes you think more about the code you write and how it should compose, while a fully fledged IDE encourages you to just throw more code at the problem.
I think the ACME way should be used for love of code and ideally when you want to create libraries that stand the test of time. When you just want to get things done fast bring the full IDE and now some LLM vibes and it’s done.
I experience something similar with system design, where the act of creating a diagram helps me to understand much faster than trying to read someone else’s diagram. It’s not because only I can create good diagrams (I cannot) but again because the act of creating one helps me internalize the design.