I program almost daily with only bold, italics and grey (for comments) in my vim rules for highlighting.

I can read my code just fine.

If your beard is long and gray enough you can do syntax highlighting on the fly

we only had a black and white printer, I don't think they would spring for color. Also, iirc he had a script he had us run to print it, so it' not like we were printing straight from the editor.

Why would you need color to read and understand code?