Go versus Brand X

[Antoine Pitrou]

Le Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:30:16 -0600, Robert Kern a écrit :
> particularly constrained environments like editors that may not be 
> extensible at all.

I'm not really an expert on this, but I think most good editors /are/ 
extensible (through plugins, scripts or other things).

> You can get away with just that and have something people recognize as
> syntax highlighting, yes. But if it is possible to highlight local
> variables, globals, and types differently, that *is* useful. And you
> will even see some syntax highlighters doing more advanced things like
> that even for Python (though mostly with heuristics).

I suppose it's a matter of taste. I don't expect syntax highlighting to 
do anything else than make the source code more readable and make some 
important things stick out (comments, keywords etc.). It's probably the 
same debate as text editor vs. full IDE. Users of text editors view 
programming as a literary practice where they manipulate text, while 
users of IDEs view programming as bringing technologies together through 
specialized tools.

Interestingly, we don't know how easy to parse Go is. We just have to 
trust their word on that, but perhaps Python is easier to parse (while 
being less ugly).