Comment by wombat-man
1 day ago
I had a professor who asked us to print source code for our projects for him to read. Looks like he's still at it. I'm sure he's being driven insane in these AI times.
1 day ago
I had a professor who asked us to print source code for our projects for him to read. Looks like he's still at it. I'm sure he's being driven insane in these AI times.
Wild, did he ask you to use a colored printer for syntax highlighting?
I program almost daily with only bold, italics and grey (for comments) in my vim rules for highlighting.
I can read my code just fine.
If your beard is long and gray enough you can do syntax highlighting on the fly
A well maintained beard is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.
we only had a black and white printer, I don't think they would spring for color. Also, iirc he had a script he had us run to print it, so it' not like we were printing straight from the editor.
RIP vim `:hardcopy` :( .
For some harder C code (implementing `malloc` for example) my preferred debugging method was printing out the code and debugging it with a pen between classes.
I eventually realized being inside an editor gave me too much attraction to thrash with "just one more quick iteration & debug run..." and could actually end up more time consuming than being forced to reconcile my mental model with what I had already written by me double checking my assumptions.
Interestingly, some of my peers started picking up the habit for their own projects and we ended up having small "debugging" sessions by trading print-outs .
2 replies →
Why would you need color to read and understand code?
Source code has a structure, and some parts are more important to the reader than others. Good syntax highlighting makes the important parts easier to see; bad highlighting gives all parts the same emphasis. Notionally you could use font weight to convey this in a black and white medium, but color makes this easier.
After working as a programmer for about a decade, I went back to college to try to complete my education. This was when I first encountered code printed in a textbook. And it was just black monospace font on white paper. No color, not even bold / italic etc. It was Java.
Initially, it was much harder to read, both because of the habit I've developed and because, I think, the author also didn't use a "fancy" editor to write their code, so it wasn't formatted properly, didn't observe naming conventions. Well, your typical college professor writing. My first reaction was to type the code into the editor so I can explore it easier. This, of course, also provided syntax highlighting.
Of course, it took extra time. So, eventually, for shorter snippets, I'd just suffer, skipping all the typing part. I later discovered it to be somewhat helpful exercise when using Git diff or other Git commands that displayed code snippets in terminal w/o highlighting. But then the industry caught up to it, and now I don't have to read unadulterated Git output like that.
So, my conclusion so far: highlighting helps to discern the structure, to process larger blocks of code and to navigate it more efficiently. You can get better at reading code that's not highlighted, but it's never going to be as good as reading the highlighted code. It just seems like the struggle to even get to the level where it's palatable not worth it as there are very few situations where it would come in handy.
Yes. People complain about AI but the downfall of human cognition began when syntax highlighting, formatting and indentation were introduced. /s