I will always yap to anyone who will listen that I think syntax highlighting was a mistake that has cost humanity untold millions of productivity hours. I only highlight comments to distinguish code from not-code, I think everything else is a pretty distraction. Note how nobody ever got the idea to apply syntax highlighting to English or any other natural language, whether in books or on forums. I could believe syntax highlighting helps learn to distinguish things when you're new to programming, but for experienced readers syntax parsing happens as automatically as it does in natural language without any need of colors.

The article touches upon this:

> Unlike prose, where you usually read it linearly, with code you bounce around based on what connected elements you are exploring.

The moment you are jumping around a lot while reading, being able to understand the structure quickly becomes a major help. For example, dictionaries will have the words in a bold font while italicizing things like the plural etc.