I get the why, kind of - if you need colors to make sense of code, maybe the code isn't clear enough. If you send blobs of code through email and other systems that don't necessarily have syntax highlighting, it also makes sense. But on a website, whyever not?

Personally I can't say when I was last actually aware of syntax highlighting. The only time I'm actively engaged with it is to change the default low contrast comment color that a lot of themes have (for some reason, as if comments are unimportant / noise) to something better. For Go, I don't really notice when it has or doesn't have syntax highlighting, at least not on e.g. go's website.

There's a reason for this. Rob Pike was asked about it and said that syntax highlighting reminds him of the bright colors of children's toys and he personally disables it so that he can focus on the text.

I don't know why it's still like that but that's the original reasoning.

The Go official web site doesn't even use the Go fonts: https://go.dev/blog/go-fonts

I wonder if the Go fonts has been created just to get a trademark on the "Go" word...

When I started learning Go I went all in including using the recommended editor (acme editor) which has no syntax highlighting, no autocomplete and a very different way of writing code. My production went down a lot but the quality of the code went up a lot.

I think the lack of syntax highlighting was one reason for that. It makes you think more about the code you write and how it should compose, while a fully fledged IDE encourages you to just throw more code at the problem.

I think the ACME way should be used for love of code and ideally when you want to create libraries that stand the test of time. When you just want to get things done fast bring the full IDE and now some LLM vibes and it’s done.

I just have a tampermonkey profile for go.dev to fix that for me.