Comment by zahlman

> Color carries a huge amount of information. Color draws our attention. Color distinguishes things. And we just use it to distinguish syntax.

I didn't actually find the uncoloured circle to be that much harder to spot.

Before looking at the concrete examples, I thought:

> Understanding the syntax similarly isn't hard scanning over the code. But if the words were coloured in a way that didn't correspond to syntax, I expect I would find it distracting, in the same way as those experiments with colour words written in a different colour from what the word indicates. Trying to make use of that second information channel isn't necessarily a good idea.

> I like the aesthetic of syntax-coloured code. But also, it's reassuring. I'm not using it to help understand the syntax, but to confirm that there's software in place that understands the syntax the same way I do.

After: the rainbow parentheses honestly don't help that much, not for a language like LISP anyway. The context highlighting seems to work much better. But then, as I go on through the examples... these are all really doing the same kind of thing that syntax highlighting does! They're about the structure of the code. And I'd have to shift my expectation, but once aligned, it's again something I'd perceive the same way — as something to confirm my understanding rather than eliciting that understanding.

Perhaps being able to switch between colouring modes would change that, but I don't know how quickly I could get used to that technique. And then, the kind of code where most of these things would help is smelly anyway. I already try to avoid this kind of nesting. Maybe import and argument highlighting (which could be used at the same time, along with highlighting for class attributes and closures in Python?), though...