The specific case of pre- and post- memory management could be handled by hooks (like in emacs lisp) or automatically through an abstraction along the lines of

The specific case of pre- and post- memory management could be handled by hooks (like in emacs lisp) or automatically through an abstraction along the lines of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_acquisition_is_initialization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_acquisition_is_initia... I'd argue that some languages have some quite powerful syntactic conventions. Pattern matching and algebraic data types are very clear and concise (and statically-checkable) ways to write code. A whiteboard can't compete in the concrete case of covering all the possibilities and proving it. There's clearly more wit in those constructs than in a simple AST, which seems to me to contradict your claim.