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Comment by stevebmark | Hacker News Reader

Not this again

"We should remove all color from traffic lights and make people remember which position is what"

Somewhat of a false dichotomy, no? I'm not hurrying up to remove syntax highlighting of source, but I also don't particular care that I don't have it in email snippets. Or in many books. (Of course, now I need to go verify that my books don't actually have some form of typographic trick for source code. Other than tt.)

I have gone for a more reserved theme in my editor lately. Currently on solarized again, but probably going back to zenburn soon.

Surely this would make people slow down and pay attention or you know just crash more.

There was an article shared here on HN some time back about the guy who got one Dutch town to remove the warning signs on its traffic circles.

Accident rates dropped sharply.

Right, but realistically they'd just crash more and then what's been achieved? Some of us get to feel smug about how the daft plebs aren't hard-core enough to navigate without colored traffic lights?

not OP but I believe that was the point he was making

The difference here is that on a traffic light the colors are important and inherent to the traffic light's functionality.

This is not true in source code. Syntax highlighting "helps" you to spot strings, numbers, keyword arguments etc. faster. But normally this is not what programming is about.

> The difference here is that on a traffic light the colors are important and inherent to the traffic light's functionality.

They're really not. See also: millions of red-green colorblind people.

The top one is stop, the bottom one is go.

I think you've done a better job supporting the other side. The direction and order is important and inherent to the traffic lights functionality, not the color. The color merely helps identify state. Colorblind people can drive fine without knowing which is red and which is green.

The point of colors in syntax highlighting, to me, is not to have a handicap, it's to read the code at the fastest speed possible. No one who is so new to an editor or a language should have the unrealistic expectations to understand the colors and read at full speed in their first hour of gazing.

When you talk about reading the code then you mean parsing? When you think you gain productivity by parsing the code in strings, variable assignments, function calls, numbers etc. then syntax highlighting is good for you. But I don't think a programmer gains anything from this.

That would be fun. There are a significant amount of people in my building that don't realize the top light means the elevator is going up and the bottom light means it's going down.

About 8% of the world is color blind, so having standard positions on traffic light is indeed very important.

Actually instead they tint the traffic light colours to make them distinguishable to colour blind folk.

It's actually really uncommon to be completely unable to see colour; mostly it is just a problem to be able to distinguish colours.

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