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Comment by glup | Hacker News Reader

Dark mode comment: in the last week of traveling, I have been asked twice by strangers in airports what programming language I am using. In both cases I was writing an email in OS X mail in dark mode.

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Are you a developer? If so, you may have unintentionally provided subtle hints to them that you're a developer. Everyone seems to be able to guess that I'm a developer regardless of what I'm doing and whether or not I'm wearing a tech-related t-shirt. If they think you're a developer, it's not surprising they would be quick to leap to the conclusion that you're writing code.

My off the cuff guess: Someone saw a young person in casual clothing in an environment that made it obvious they were non-local (i.e. a white dude in a Chinese airport or something) in an off-season for tourism, and thought "well they're either here for business or pleasure, and one of the few people that can afford a pleasure trip in the middle of the year like this (money + time off) is a developer."

Kinda fun to think about all the subtle clues we're giving off without even realizing it. Of course any of these observations could lead to a totally wrong conclusion, which makes me start to think of all the fun ways you could "disguise" yourself in modern society.

It might be even simpler than that. Add to the mix a Macbook with some conference or software-related stickers and glasses, and there you got it.

you were programming in text, a very popular programming language that i'm using right now :)

here is a peg grammar:

    text = $.*

you can try it at https://pegjs.org/online :)

edit: sry to disappoint but this matches binary files too :(

In a modern IDE, syntax highlighting is quite important, and varied. On a light background it's much harder to distinguish differences in hue than on a dark background. With a couple dozen highlight types this easily becomes a problem when you can't tell two different but similar hues and lose the syntax highlighting signal. An attempt to reduce eyestrain by making not all colors garish makes this task harder yet.

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