A well maintained beard is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.

RIP vim `:hardcopy` :( .

For some harder C code (implementing `malloc` for example) my preferred debugging method was printing out the code and debugging it with a pen between classes.

I eventually realized being inside an editor gave me too much attraction to thrash with "just one more quick iteration & debug run..." and could actually end up more time consuming than being forced to reconcile my mental model with what I had already written by me double checking my assumptions.

Interestingly, some of my peers started picking up the habit for their own projects and we ended up having small "debugging" sessions by trading print-outs .

Source code has a structure, and some parts are more important to the reader than others. Good syntax highlighting makes the important parts easier to see; bad highlighting gives all parts the same emphasis. Notionally you could use font weight to convey this in a black and white medium, but color makes this easier.

After working as a programmer for about a decade, I went back to college to try to complete my education. This was when I first encountered code printed in a textbook. And it was just black monospace font on white paper. No color, not even bold / italic etc. It was Java.

Initially, it was much harder to read, both because of the habit I've developed and because, I think, the author also didn't use a "fancy" editor to write their code, so it wasn't formatted properly, didn't observe naming conventions. Well, your typical college professor writing. My first reaction was to type the code into the editor so I can explore it easier. This, of course, also provided syntax highlighting.

Of course, it took extra time. So, eventually, for shorter snippets, I'd just suffer, skipping all the typing part. I later discovered it to be somewhat helpful exercise when using Git diff or other Git commands that displayed code snippets in terminal w/o highlighting. But then the industry caught up to it, and now I don't have to read unadulterated Git output like that.

So, my conclusion so far: highlighting helps to discern the structure, to process larger blocks of code and to navigate it more efficiently. You can get better at reading code that's not highlighted, but it's never going to be as good as reading the highlighted code. It just seems like the struggle to even get to the level where it's palatable not worth it as there are very few situations where it would come in handy.

Yes. People complain about AI but the downfall of human cognition began when syntax highlighting, formatting and indentation were introduced. /s

> The user controls their default font size on their platform. What if they'd already increased it, and now I'm just making it bigger?

The person making the site however wanted someone to change their default font size

We have to also consider that the person in question is most likely not having a bad experience on every app and website, and that this guy just had a tiny font size on his site

Even this famously tiny fonted site is readable on mobile

Looks like in Chrome on mobile you can set it per site, but you need to dig into accessibility for that. I don't see a way to do that in FF, so you would have to set the default which would effect all sites.