alt Hacker NewsAll C-derived languages (e.g. Java and Rust) have a bad syntax, with tons of superfluous parentheses and many other superfluous tokens, like semicolons or commas.
This normally matters very little, because a good editor will always insert a complete template whenever you type something like "if", "for", "while" etc.
Most programmers are blind to the syntax defects with which they are accustomed and they notice only the syntax defects with which they are unfamiliar.
I would prefer a language with a good syntax, but unfortunately which programming languages have survived in widespread use has a poor correlation with the technical qualities of a language and especially a really negligible correlation with how good its syntax was.
There are too many HN readers who downvote the comments that state real facts about which they are not aware, instead of bothering to investigate and learn something new for them.
What I have written above about the C-derived languages is a fact, not a personal opinion. Anyone who downvoted it has just demonstrated ignorance about programming languages. Too many modern programmers are familiar only with languages derived from "C", which have retained the bad syntax of C, despite criticizing C for unsafety or other such properties, and they do not know anything, or they know only incorrect myths, about the many other programming languages that have existed, and which frequently had certain features that were superior to any of the currently popular languages.
In another comment in this thread I have given a couple of typical program structures of the C programming language, which require a double number of syntactic tokens in comparison with well designed older programming languages, such as ALGOL 68 (which has been the source of several C features, but even some of those have been dumbed down a lot in comparison with the original, e.g. "union").