I have that same reaction to ornamentation of browsers. I feel that the more pixels there are around the code, the harder it is to see the code. To me it's a low signal-to-noise ratio.

Cheers,
Bob

On 2/24/13 1:31 AM, tim Rowledge wrote:

On 23-02-2013, at 3:36 PM, Chris Muller <asqueaker@gmail.com> wrote:

> Wow, I'm surprised -- the human eye discerns color contrast much more
> easily than patterns.

It's possible that is a very personal effect. I suspect it is at least partially a matter of how good your eyesight is, and very likely relates to your experience too; I've been doing this stuff for far too long and have grown very used to reading Smalltalk. I simply don't need advice from a bit of code about which tokens are messages, variables, comments or whatever. The extraneous data actually distracts from the wanted information, acting almost like camouflage.