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I've often seen the claim that not having operator precedence hurts a language's acceptance, but is there any concrete evidence of that? Could it just be a coin

I've often seen the claim that not having operator precedence hurts a language's acceptance, but is there any concrete evidence of that? Could it just be a coincidence? Were it not for the closed/licensed/expensive/commercial nature of Smalltalks, the language probably would not have fallen into to the relative obscurity it suffers today. I personally doubt that operators had anything to do with it. From what I've read of the history of the era, the language itself was much-loved and rising in popularity until the introduction of Java disrupted the traditional Smalltalk business models.

silentbicycle 17y ago
While it isn't exactly the same thing, OCaml requires you to use different operators (e.g. + vs. +.) for ints and floating point numbers, and it's a very common complaint about the language. (It has conventional precedence.) When conventional arithmetic doesn't "just work", languages will often give a first impression of being awkward, even though the rules of operator precedence are actually more complicated than just consistently using prefix or infix left-to-right.