(i should add that as a parenthetical in the article)

this is exactly what a newbie would see if they opened up a built-in text editor on, say, their mac. something similar would happen for windows. (same goes for lack of fancy terminal customizations.)

getting a syntax-highlighting editor is an extra installation step that can take hours to set up and explain in a class, due to people's different environmental setups. e.g., someone has some obscure virus checker installed that prevents gVim or Emacs or Sublime Text or whatever from installing, or crashes on startup.

edit: also, it's putting lipstick on a porcine. the code examples i've shown will be equally cryptic to a beginner even with syntax highlighting.