On 23-02-2013, at 3:36 PM, Chris Muller <asqueaker at 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.

[snip]
>   Further, by making
> comments a light-gray, they are just barely visible, so they're not
> cluttering the code,

Now I'd tend to prefer almost hiding the code, since it distracts from the explanation. "Don't document the program, programme the document" as an old colleague pointed out.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
999, the number of the Aussie Beast.