I think context coloring applied to the background would make more sense.
In my opinion, the author misunderstood what makes syntax coloring useful. I can only speak from a personal point of view, but for me, syntax coloring is not about hinting at syntax or helping me understand it's about improving visual search speed.
When I crunch through existing code, looking for "something", there are multiple things going on.
Firstly, I'm not looking for specific implementation text, I'm looking for a concept, an idea.
So I'm not actually reading the letters or forming words, I'm not even looking that much at the length of the words.
I'm looking at the shape much more, and at the shape level, syntax coloring gives a nice hint to what KIND of shape I'm looking at.
When I've found an interesting shape, I'll scan for the concept, I still don't read everything, maybe a few function names, which are super quick to find, partly because the syntax highlighting makes them stand out, so I can scan to figure out if I'm at the interesting part yet.
When I think I am, I'll start executing code: I'm not checking for correctness at this point, this is not a review, I assume it works, so I ignore much everything that's not function or variable names, syntax coloring is instrumental in this too, as it allows me to ignore by color.
When I'm executing fully, the types and other details fly into my mind automatically, partly due to syntax coloring.<p>If I were to turn the table on the author, I'd say he has a problem keeping track of simple scoping and tries to cope.. I would suggest he turn on the indentation markers in his editor, that's what he wants. Though he should be aware that in some languages, context is much more complex than indentation, and that's the kind that'd be interesting to highlight, for example, by changing background color.<p>--<p>Ps, I wrote my first many klocs in windows notepad, so it's not like I was brought up on syntax highlighting and can't get past it, it's just that I've learnt to take advantage of a richer environment (vim).