our text editors, our secret masters

Ever wonder how much of our programming style is dictated by our desire to see the right pretty colors? In Perl, I think it’s a good bit.

For example, I know that the person who wrote this line wasn’t using Vim’s default Perl syntax:

Account->q(accountid => $self->{accountid});

…because it would interpret q(...) as a non-interpolative string. Meanwhile, the guy who wrote this was:

$logger->("setting account information to \%info");

…because syntax highlighting told him that %info was a variable, even though Perl doesn’t interpolate hashes.

I always put spaces around my range operators, because otherwise in 1..2 the dots are different colors.

Other examples welcome.

Written on October 8, 2008