Comment by ntstr

Which also makes more sense if you take into consideration that he has a form of colour blindness: https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2020/09/color-blindness-i...

Ultimately he's fine with _some_ syntax highlighting, especially the kind that uses whitespace to highlight parts of the syntax, as evidenced by the existence of `go fmt`. He just hasn't taken into consideration that colour is just one typographical tool among many, including the use of whitespace, as well as italics, bold, size, typeface, etc. Switching inks has been somewhat tedious in printing, but these days most publications seem to support it just fine, and obsessive note-takers also use various pens and highlighters in different colours. For the rest of us it's mostly about the toil of switching pens that's holding us back I think, rather than some real preference for monochromatic notes. We generally have eyes that can discern colours and brains that can process that signal in parallel to other stuff, which along with our innate selective attention means we can filter out the background or have our attention drawn to stuff like red lights. Intentionally not using that built-in hardware feature is ultimately just making stuff harder on oneself with no particular benefit.

There's also some google groups quote from him about iterators which is also pretty funny given how modern Go uses them, but I don't have the link at hand. Several google groups quotes from the original language creators (not just Pike) tell an unfortunate story about how the language came to be the way it is.

“I don’t like this so let’s force every one who disagrees with me to do it my way if they want to read my stuff”. How very mature

Might release an extension just to spite him

Smugness 101, or how to convey a personal preference in the most insufferable way imaginable.

I'm a fan of Rob Pike, but not of Go. Rob Pike contributed a lot of thought to editor tooling through the years, albeit not in the direction the industry seems to be going -- for example, Sam and Acme are two editors he developed. Acme UI design is inspired by Oberon and is based on tiling, but 3rd party tooling integration is entirely different and leverages Plan9 concepts to enable a whole lot of extensibility with practically zero complexity overhead due to integration -- without any true plugin architecture. There are limits to what can be accomplished this way, but it is surprisingly powerful and I can see why a community might gravitate to his views. Unfortunately he takes this minimalist approach too far when it comes to languages IMO -- a language with no coproducts in 2025 is either a niche language or unnecessarily underpowered (how they do error handling is atrocious). Over the last decade Go went from the former to the latter.

This is hilarious to me

Imagine the brain cycles rob pike is wasting. Good on him for having so many to spare

It's definitely weird in this day and age, but in the Go code examples... I don't miss it.

Paraphrasing, but if you need syntax highlighting to comprehend code, maybe your code is too complicated.