[crispinb]

It's so long since I've written any code without syntax colouring, I don't even know if it can be turned off in my main GUI tools (IntelliJ & VS Code). When I've occasionally seen code in notepad or an unconfigured vi, it looks like an undifferentiated mess. Which isn't to say it wouldn't be a useful or interesting exercise to try without it for a while. What we're habituated to isn't always a good guide for how to proceed.

Colouring by nesting level might be useful in javascript, but strikes me as a poor idea in the other languages I'm using right now (Java, Go, Rust). Nesting is often accidental complexity, and can usually be reduced with a bit of thought. For that reason I'm happy for deep nesting to be visually confusing - it's a useful extra motivator.

(Come to think of it, with async/await, one of the main cause sof deep nesting in javascript can be minimised also).