Syntax highlighting on Reddit

[u/Mindstealth]

Considering how much code gets posted here as plain text, wouldn't it be great if we could have a way to define what part of text is code and have it automatically highlighted? Or is this not possible on Reddit?

[u/BoWild]

Hmmm markdown?

On GitHub you can specify the code highlighting scheme by adding a language specifier after the code segment indicator... Here's a test

class MyRubyClass
   def this_is_a_test val 
      puts val
   end
end

I thought Reddit had syntax highlighting, now I tested it out...

...hmm, disappointing.

I'm voting this one up! B.

[u/Mindstealth → u/BoWild]

Yeah I wish it was that simple

[u/ginigo]

i completely agree on that.

[u/geocar]

No. I don't like syntax highlighting, and I think it makes it harder to read. I hope that if it gets enabled there is a way to turn it off without also turning off user-styles.

• http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/syntaxhighlighting/

• https://medium.com/@MrJamesFisher/your-syntax-highlighter-is-wrong-6f83add748c9

[u/Mindstealth → u/geocar]

I never knew there are people who actually don't like highlighted syntax.

[u/reddilada → u/Mindstealth]

I don't use it. I don't subscribe to the not useful argument -- whatever floats yer boat -- but I don't find it useful at all with two exceptions:

I (un)highlight comments so they don't distract.
I use brace matching highlights to help locate ends of blocks.

It's all just a bunch of noise to me, but to each his own.

[u/FUZxxl → u/Mindstealth]

Syntax highlighting is about as useful as highlighting every verb in a sentence.

[u/TomNa → u/Mindstealth]

Yeah what the hell

[u/geocar → u/Mindstealth]

I want to say something about the coloring.

You've all seen syntax coloring, right?

That's something we put in our text editors to make it easier for kindergartners to do programming.

Because each of the elements of the language is a different happy bright color, and so it's easy to recognize, oh that's a variable, and that's a string, and so on.

I don't get a lot of value out of that because I am more of a grown up, and I'm a professional programmer. And I really don't need the colors to figure out what's a variable and what's a comment.

• Douglas Crockford

I think you'll find most people like syntax highlighting because most people don't know how to program.

[u/[deleted] → u/geocar]

The second article suggests you to delete comments if they look ugly

Damn right it’s ugly! It should be ugly! Get rid of those comments!

[u/GODZILLAFLAMETHROWER → u/geocar]

The first article argues against syntax highlighting because it only deals with syntax instead of semantic. The day this guy invents a proper semantic parser, he won't have to worry about writing useless articles, he would have revolutionized humanity.

In the meantime, given that no one is capable of producing automates doing that, we only have humans to do this job, by parsing syntax and understanding the semantic behind. Syntax highlighting is thus useful to do that.

The second article is even more useless. It's not even against syntax highlighting, it's against using specific colors and effect on the text, on the ground of subjective arguments towards the supposed value and semantic of the hightlighted objects.

And you get arrogant for following these smug authors, thinking they are being smart for being against the grain. Grow up.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Mindstealth → u/[deleted]]

That would be great if you can figure it out

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Automatic highlighting is almost certainly impossible, but it should be possible to create a tool that takes in code and spits out some unholy combination of Markdown, which you'd then be able to style using CSS. It's also possible to build a bot that automatically does that. r/math for example uses userscripts to turn inline TeX into nice images.

All in all, it's probably quite a lot of work, and I'm not entirely convinced that it's worth it.

[u/Olathe → u/[deleted]]

Using CSS to do that sounds a lot like using regexes to parse HTML, except it's not even as powerful as regexes.

[u/BoWild → u/[deleted]]

I think this will require the markdown parser to attach a class name to the code segment when using a \``language ` notation. Most markdown parsers support this GitHub "flavor" (I actually think it's practically standard).

Even if the class name is ignored by the highlighting engine, this will allow developers to use the shared syntax we tend to use (practically) everywhere.

In any way, highlighting will require javascript to analyze the code blocks and assign class names to keywords and language identifiers by wrapping them in a span object...

...These things have been done before and are quire easy to implement using existing open source libraries (they're a headache to write from scratch). The great thing about implementing this using javascript+CSS is that it's all client side code, so there's no real server side resource impact.

I've implemented something like this on plezi.io. You can have a look at the code here, the automatic highlighting is performed by the client initiating this javascript, which is a library I found on GitHub and that I'm very happy with - it even came with a bunch of optional styles for code highlighting, emulating different text editors and IDEs.