Comment by norir

I personally find syntax highlighting an annoying distraction, but I know this is a minority (and unpopular) viewpoint. For me, it actually has negative value, especially if I find myself spending time troubleshooting it (which I have extensively over the years) rather than actually working on the true problem at hand. I can't think of a single case where automatic syntax highlighting helped me solve a hard problem, but I have certainly wasted a lot of time futzing around with it.

The vast majority of code you are reading is almost definitionally syntactically correct, unless you are in the process of editing it. In that case, syntax highlighting can provide a lightweight proxy for correctness, which I suspect is where much of the enthusiasm comes from. What I personally want is immediate feedback on the actual correctness of the code, and syntax is just a subset.

That is not to say that highlighting is never useful. I just want it to be manual, like when you search for something with / in vim. Then the highlighted items actually pop and my eyes can go directly to the area I want to focus on. I immediately clear the highlighting as soon as I'm done because otherwise it creates a visual distraction.

In my estimation, what we actually need more of are smarter, faster compilers that can immediately respond to edit changes and highlight only the problem areas in the code. Typically, this should be exactly where my cursor is. I should ideally be programming in a state where everything above the cursor can be assumed correct, but there might be a problem with the current word, which is helpfully reported to me exactly where my focus already lies.