Does syntax highlighting help programming novices? (2018)

I’m not a novice and I don’t know what the colors mean either. I’m not dyslexic at all, but I feel the same as you. Code doesn’t look right, and the changes in color helps with readability.

It’s also a crude spell checker. “Hmm, the word didn’t change color so it’s probably not `elseif` … let me try `elif`. Yep, that changed color!” Kind of thing.

The other two major pain points where color coding really makes it obvious what’s going on, is when a string is left unclosed and everything turns into “the wrong” color and matching of parentheses.

Agreed - it's hard to put your finger on it, but _something_ makes the code much easier to parse mentally at a glance.

As a decidedly non-novice programmer, one thing I do when mapping out unfamiliar code architectures, which I haven't seen anyone else doing, is to generate large-scale code maps by "inlining" function call bodies into a large Google Doc, creating a deeply nested tree where indentation maps to control flow and stack depth, and vertical position maps to execution order (excluding loops). Then I often trace data flow for important variables, by giving the variable one foreground or background color, then giving all future usages of the same value (or pointers to it) the same color. Unfortunately preparing this type of document by hand is quite time-consuming. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=wcrichto... seems to be a preliminary attempt at tracing data flow within a function, but doesn't seem to currently handle cross-function data flow (or generate an inlined tree suitable for visualizing caller-callee and sibling-call control flow).

The weirdest thing is that several languages have formatters and linters that constantly convert text into tokens and then back into text. Just do it one time and convert what text the user enters into a token then process that token like you say into a visual block that guides the developer better than plain text with completions.

Absolutely! UML gets a lot of discussion, but a more reflective model of a written program is something I long for. I love the feedback that I get from, say, writing a Tupfile and running `tup graph` to see an actual graph of all my recipes, complete with their commands, inputs, outputs, and interdependencies as understood by the build system. I haven't used Unity, but it looks like it has blender-like node-based programming that gives me the same feel, where each box ia just code but the connections between them are illustrated. Lastly, Emacs allows you to instrument function definitions with edebug, and stepping through the code or even just letting it run in a loop and observing the movement of the point-of-execution has given me a lot insight into packages that I've worked on. None of this is really "the thing", but each example gives me the same vibes, of showing how existing code or control flows are structured.

There was something like this a month ago on Show HN: PickCode – An educational coding environment for students after Scratch

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32230329

This is a kind of thing people built to realize they’re not that useful looking at the results (still think they can have value, it just feels too limited to be widely adopted)

Take SQL for instance: we already have tools that will take table definitions and built an UML tree from that. I used that kind of tools 3 times in my life, and threw away the result to draw something manually to really understand what was happening. The main issues were excessive visual complexity, noise from all the meaningless bindings, random component placement making is hard to mentally group components.

I’d expect these issues to be 100x worse with any code that expands beyond a single function, as the cyclomatic complexity would in average be a lot higher and we’d have a lot more noise from guard conditions and boilerplate.

Looking at it the other way works too: coding what we write everyday in ruby or typescript, but in Scratch, would be a crazy visual mess that would push anyone into depression.

The closest to this I have seen is something like Mathematica, where the frontend can map back and forth between visual widgets and code pretty seamlessly. I always wished they would actually take it a bit further, but some of the things you can do are cool.

I don’t know, in my opinion an advanced IDE is sort of that - I don’t think of IntelliJ’s text as notepad’s - it is more an AST in textual form as per the language’s grammar.

My human brain is very fast at parsing that to a tree based on visual cues, while the program does the same constantly - syntax highlighting is important exactly for this reason, if it is colorful, it parsed correctly, that’s the feedback between machine and human.

Even manipulations are AST-level, I expand the selection based on that, etc. It just has a very fast, “invisible” node-edit mode where you can just type a few characters to change the function node’s name.

> I like VisualStudio / VSCode but one recent issue I have had is with their parentheses/brackets/braces coloring. It doesn't add a lot of value as I am used to matching parantheses/brackets/braces using the hotkey. I find it annoying and distracting enough, but haven't bothered to research if that option can be turned off in the IDE.

Look into the setting '"editor.bracketPairColorization.enabled": true'.

Good example. I sometimes teach programming to grad students who have no previous experience. When they first encounter syntax highlighting, they are impressed with how pretty it makes things look. However, it becomes apparent that it's more of a distraction than anything else, so I encourage them to leave highlighting turned off. Oh, except for matching bracket highlighting. That is genuinely helpful.

> and someone went and highlighted all the verbs in one color and nouns in another, how useful would that be?

Uhh, as someone who likes learning languages, this is immensely helpful.

One of my favourite Mandarin graded readers actually highlights personal pronouns in the text, (because names are just Chinese words) so we can read the story without getting caught up in "the car climbed the tree? Wtf? Oh no it's 'the guy named car' has climbed the tree"

That being said I agree that this is a digression, I think syntax highlighting will only help newbies marginally. There's a lot more that goes with understanding code

We have enough conflict about the best case of tokens. I think any attempt to prescribe the colour of tokens would lead to all out war.