Syntax Highlight Considered Harmful

Did you think that " real men use windows "? You were a big mistake. They use IDE Acme . Which, among other things, is distinguished by the absence of syntax highlighting.

And this is not because Acme is still young, and just did not have time to acquire such features, which are critical for IDE. (I don’t know exactly how old Acme is, but Pike published an article " Acme - A User Interface for Programmers " back in 1994.) No, it's different! This "feature" is considered unnecessary, and even harmful.

By the way, Acme is available not only under Plan9 and Inferno (where it is the main development environment), but there are also ports for other OSs. In particular, there is a version based on Inferno: Acme SAC , working under Linux, Mac OS, Windows - wherever Inferno works. In fact, this is just an example of what I once wrote about - using Inferno not as a full-fledged OS, but as a virtual machine for running one application, a la JVM.

What is so harmful about syntax highlighting? Well, for example, it is difficult to deny the fact that it improves readability and code perception. Is it good? Ha! But they did not guess! This is bad. The fact is that complex and confusing code with syntax highlighting is still possible to write and perceive. But without her - Oppsies! Without it, it will often not even compile for you, not something that works. And now open the code of any application Inferno - it is perfectly perceived without syntax highlighting. Because simple and clear. Or maybe it is so simple and clear because it was written without syntax highlighting ...

Additional information on the topic can be found, for example, here and here . Actually, these two branches are curious enough to read in its entirety.
')
PS To my shame, I am not a real man, and morally not ready to work in such a samurai style. Therefore, I write the code on Limbo not in Acme inside Inferno, but in Vim on host OS. I laid out my Limbo syntax highlighting for Vim , use it on health, fake men. :)