I'm the opposite, and when rationalizing it to myself I'm thinking that our traditional black-on-white writing has more to do with the fact that it's easier to stain light paper with dark ink/coal/etc than dark paper and light writing.

This is no longer the case with displays, so we can choose ourselves, and light on dark is much easier on my eyes (at least it feels like that).

I've always found that black boards were more readable than black ink on white paper

and I think that's why in large classrooms they are still the favourite medium

If find it the other way around. Dark backgrounds makes white text easier to read. And yes, Smalltalk source-code management is not intuitive (i.e., not like the others like git, Hg, svn) though it works well enough.

I'm afraid you might be in the minority. A strong majority of developers I know (and even those whose desks I just walk past) seem to be using dark themes in their editors/IDE's.

Personally, I find that if I'm looking at a screen for many hours at a time a darker theme helps prevent eye strain, or at least prolong the inevitable. YMMV, of course.

The key word here is “personally”. Personally, I can't read anything with dark background at all. It only takes a few seconds before everything starts swirling in front of my eyes, and when looking away from the screen everything around me starts to look weird. It takes several seconds for me to return to normal.

I've been told this can be caused by astigmatism (which I have), but I haven't spent much time researching it. When I come across a web site with dark background (thankfully quite rare) I use a Chrome plugin that can fix it, and it works reasonably well in most cases.

Brighter themes are harsher on the eyes, whereas darker themes are not. At least that's why I prefer them.

It might sound a little odd, but I slightly prefer programming in a harsh-on-the-eyes environment from time to time. I think it keeps one out of one's "comfort zone" and thus more focused on immediate problem-solving.

How does the joke go? -- "Hours of planning can be saved by just a few weeks of coding" or something along those lines. I find a garish eyestrain-inducing theme to incite me to spend more time planning and less time coding.

Could be interesting to make an ADHD theme...

I think I might have cracked that one... I configured my .emacs to randomly choose from a selection of 20 or so monospace fonts (filtered by local-machine availability) and ~35 different color themes each time it starts up.

> This is, of course, quite OT, but what is it with the trend towards dark color schemes?

IIRC, on emissive displays (e.g., pretty much every computer display), light on dark produces more eyestrain with extended use, especially in dark environments.

This is less pronounced with reflective media like paper (at least, in most practical scenarios; you could contrive lighting scenarios with a similar problems, but they don't usually occur accidentally.)

OTOH, Pharo has a very good light theme, even if it's not the default.

Got floaters. Dark is better because of less shadows. I am pushing the dark theme thing in Pharo for that very reason.

BTW, there is the Sublimish Theme that didn't made the release but will be in Pharo 7.

The general take for the next release is to make all of the skinning easier for the system. Like how easy WinAmp was to skin.

>...dark color schemes? I find that it makes text significantly harder to read.

Same here. Something about high-contrast schemes irritates my eyes; and I have trouble reading low-contrast text on dark backgrounds, so I've been using black-on-#FFFFDD since I noticed it on the Go Playground.

I prefer the dark themes myself.

But it is astounding easier to read black on white in bright settings, like as a passenger in a car. So sometimes I'll use it (black on white) for readability.

>This is, of course, quite OT, but what is it with the trend towards dark color schemes? I find that it makes text significantly harder to read.

Nostalgia for CRT terminals?