If everyone else is is wrong, it might be that he’s the one who is wrong.

Actually, I read his post and he’s definitely wrong. Having coded in plaint text editors without syntax highlighting, I know the candy store look really aids locating needles on this haystack. He’s proposing making more needles hay-colored so the ones he thinks are more important become the focus.

It’s just his personal taste, if he loves visual fatigue, he should enjoy it without criticizing others.

I feel like the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but this one I absolutely 100% agree with:

Comments should be highlighted, not hidden away.

I strongly disagree.

Coloring is categorization of code. Much like indent, spacing, line-breaking, aligning, it aids readability.

None of the examples they provided looked better, more appropriate, or more useful. None of the “tests” lead me to question my syntax highlighting. Quite the contrary.

By reducing the highlighting to what they seem important, they’re losing the highlighting for other cases. The examples of highlighting only one or two things make it obvious. When you highlight only method heads, you gain clarity when reading on that level, across methods, but lose everything when reading the body.

I didn’t particularly like their dark theme choice. Their initial example is certainly noisy, but you can have better themes and defaults with more subtle and more equal strength colors. The language or framework syntax and spacing can also influence it.

Bolding is very useful when color categorizes code to give additional structure discoverability, just like spacing does.

The point of many colors is not that everything is important, but showing relationship and the “type” of code. I don’t think the less colored version is better (or worse) readable. It’s a preference.