Rob Pike famously explained that C needed its space-insensitive braces and semicolons in case code was transmitted through a channel that mangled whitespace.<p>Those days predate most people reading this, yet many new language syntaxes opt for "familiarity". I wish that all language design went through a filter where every character mattered like the designer was in an episode of Squid Game.<p>Bill Joy famously explained that syntax matters, a dense syntax puts more on screen. This is true even now. I struggle with this; my favorite syntax is a preprocessor that eliminates the need for most Lisp parentheses. The result is code poetry. Nevertheless, Haskell is more expressive.<p>(Here's an easy test: Anyone who proposes a way to minimize Lisp parentheses, who hasn't introduced a symbol for missing outline levels, is just pulling out chunks and hasn't used their system to write thousands of lines of code.)<p>I've written most of my lifetime of code in C, established my career in C, and C syntax is ground glass in my eyes.