Yes, I read his reasoning, but I still can't make sense of it. The most common theme seems to be that having more colors is "distracting". I mean yes, having more colors gives your eyes more things to process... the same way that 7 letter variable names creates more work for your eyes compared to 2 letter variable names. But if someone told me that they avoid naming their variables using complete words because it's too distracting, and only used 2 letter symbols, I wouldn't understand that either.
From a physics/math perspective, yes, I get that "more" implies more entropy. Having 4 colors on your screen is more entropy compared to 2 colors. Having 7 letter names is more entropy than having 2 letter names. But if that additional entropy is used to convey clear, unambiguous and useful information, it actually makes the overall message simpler. The same way that long/descriptive variable names make reading code simpler compared to random 2 letter symbols.
On more reflection, the one reasoning I can somewhat understand, is the idea of handicapping yourself. If you force yourself to type with one hand behind your back, it gives your brain additional incentive to find concise solutions. In theory, I guess I understand this line of reasoning, but in practice, I'll still continue typing with both hands, thank you very much.
Anyway, just thinking aloud here. When I come across something I don't understand, I try my best to understand what the other side might be thinking. Not trying to attack anyone... to each his own. Best wishes.
I've not found that Alice analogy colorizing the "verbs" convincing.
With human language like English, we learn it and use it without the formal grammar++. A 5-year old child can speak to her mother ("I want some candy!") without conscious knowledge of "verbs" or "nouns". A formal grammar for categorization is what we layer on top of language for analysis in school. Two people can communicate and understand each other without any exposure to any grammar lessons. So yes, colorizing verbs looks superfluous and noisy.[2]
On the other hand, computer programming syntax starts with grammar. You learn that certain specific tokens are "data types" and other tokens are "literals", etc, etc. And that grammar categorization in programming languages never goes away as you're typing out new code. (Otherwise, you'd get a compiler error or unintended behavior because x="3"+"5" with quotes ("35") means something different from x=3+5 without quotes (8).) This is why so many programmers find color highlighting helpful even if they've been programming that language for 10+ years. Sure we want to focus on higher cognitive purpose of "semantics" but the grammar is deeply intertwined with reconstructing what the semantics is.
A closer analogy of color highlighting in a different realm would be different colors in TCPIP traces such as "red" highlighting external ip addresses. This can be helpful for forensics of malware phoning home.
Or in financials dashboards where uptrends are "green" and downtrends are "red".
The same reasons that colors help the malware analyst or stock trader quickly parse data at a glance is also how it helps programmers.
++ (at least not consciously that a 5-year old would be self-aware of it. A theory of innate universal grammar in the brain by Chomsky isn't what I'm talking about.)
The main problem is garish colors. If colors were a bit more subdued, the text would've been just as easy to read. That applies to code as well: bright red letters on black background are extremely distracting, dark purple letters on white background are not at all distracting.
As the author himself points out (though after making an argument that implies the opposite), code is not prose. Prose has its own base elements, such as phrases and titles, and it does use visual cues to point them out, such as capitalization and larger fonts.
From a physics/math perspective, yes, I get that "more" implies more entropy. Having 4 colors on your screen is more entropy compared to 2 colors. Having 7 letter names is more entropy than having 2 letter names. But if that additional entropy is used to convey clear, unambiguous and useful information, it actually makes the overall message simpler. The same way that long/descriptive variable names make reading code simpler compared to random 2 letter symbols.
On more reflection, the one reasoning I can somewhat understand, is the idea of handicapping yourself. If you force yourself to type with one hand behind your back, it gives your brain additional incentive to find concise solutions. In theory, I guess I understand this line of reasoning, but in practice, I'll still continue typing with both hands, thank you very much.
Anyway, just thinking aloud here. When I come across something I don't understand, I try my best to understand what the other side might be thinking. Not trying to attack anyone... to each his own. Best wishes.