I usually ignore syntax highlighting. I can't see it well because it's tiny, and because the "designers" usually chose colors that are tough to distinguish, and sometimes very difficult to see at all.
For instance, the default console colors in Ubuntu are TERRIBLE (maybe for everyone). The output of 'ls' uses blue letters on a black background for some type of file, and I literally cannot see those. Ditto for some errors in Emacs (e.g., trying to exit w/o saving a file). That output is invisible.
If you are an engineer and decide to do something with color in your UI, please get some designer help and listen.
As a color blind engineer, I love syntax highlighting, but mostly for the "pop" and "fade" contrast effects rather than associating specific colors with semantic values.
I'm red-green colourblind (quite badly), and also use syntax highlighting for the same reasons - it highlights semantically different parts of the syntax (or not, as wanted) even though I have no idea what the colours actually are.
As someone who's similarly red-green colorblind, I'd say it's far more likely to be related to the amount of time he's spent reading and writing code on monochrome displays, perhaps coupled with market trends that tended to associate color with cheap/mainstream/gaming hardware vs. monochrome with expensive/professional/engineering hardware. For several reasons, there was a major trade-off between color and contrast/sharpness/resolution on most hardware until the mid-90s or so, and there was a tendency for engineering-oriented systems to embrace monochrome to get the highest contrast and resolution.
I don’t think that’s it. I used syntax highlighting for nearly 20 years then stopped a decade ago and don’t miss it at all. So I had every reason to want to use it but now I don’t even want it.
I do as well. At best it helps, at worst…it’s just not useful? There’s no harm to leaving it on, unless of course the color scheme is garbage and I can’t tell the text from the background.
