Hi everyone designing the future of coding! I'm Stan, a developer by day and a calligrapher/design-geek by night. (Had my 15 mins of Instagram fame doing calligraphy on the beach! https://www.instagram.com/wanderingstan ) It's bugged me that the visual design of code has stagnated in the 20+ years since the advent of syntax highlighting. (Modulo the arguments over coding ligatures!) What would it look like to prioritize visual design in editors and in new languages? And can this be done while maintaining essential properties of code? I'm working on some blog posts/manifestos/essays on the subject (super-rough-draft attached), and a live prototype. Would love to connect with those building editors or languages for whom this idea resonates, and with designers who see code as a unique but powerful design challenge. Short bio: Was founder of a couple startups (sovrn.com, wordnik.com), early employee at many more. Most recently design prototyper in Meta AR Research. Thanks to @Gabriel Pickard for pointing me to this group!

welcome! I love wordnik!

Must say that Erin McKean was the real powerhouse worknik, but it was a delight to co-found with her!

Very cool -- wondering how your work relates to what Baecker & Marcus were doing in the 90s; their book "Human Factors and Typography for More Readable Programs" had a big impact on me.

Thank you! Can’t believe my searching hadn’t led me that book. Just found it and will be reading it now. https://archive.org/details/humanfactorstypo0000baec/

Its focus on C programming seems quaint now, but the underlying thoughts & research still seem on point.

I'd be interested to know what you think about the use of colour in syntax highlighting? Day to day I use a fairly typical colour scheme, but every now and then I wonder how this became accepted as the norm despite the fact that most (granted far from all) text is rendered in monochrome with emphasis carried by font variations.

Hi Miles! I don’t have strong opinions on coloring schemes; just a strong opinion that it’s a mistake to try and communicate all of the assistance via color alone, while ignoring type size, line spacing, etc. That said, I agree that keywords convey the least information! Even just for function headers, seeing “def def def” (python) or “function function function” (js) repeated over lines is not important, it’s the function names we care about. I wonder about setting up a sort of online testing environment where people can try standardized tasks on sample source code, and compare speed across different formatting styles. (Or is this pointless, as it always takes time to settle in to a new style??) Would be great to crowdsource some actual timing data.

I’m Really enjoying the Baeker book

Excellent! I need to re-read, I lost my copy a few jobs ago and need to track down a fresh print copy. Another one from the era that's on my shelf but I can't remember whether I read or not is Marcus' book "Graphic Design for Electronic Documents and User Interfaces" (ACM Press). Flipping through it makes me think that it 's fairly obsolete at this point. There's a lot of "here's how overlapping windows work..." level things.

…yeah talk about obsolete; the Baeker book devoted a lot of ink to figuring out where to put page breaks in code!

@brett g porter Thanks for the pointer to the Baeker book! Just got my copy in the mail yesterday. 😄

Very cool -- nice to see a bit of resurgence of interest in this topic; I think there is still a lot of important and interesting work to be done..

I was going to search, but perhaps you know off the top of your head — do you happen know of any modern-ish implementations of their ideas? (Perhaps their system is even available on GitHub, but I'd be more interested in something newer…)

I've never seen anything that comes close.