I suspect this is an artifact from their stance on mutable state, and some inspiration from more functional languages. There certainly isn't much harm in being

I suspect this is an artifact from their stance on mutable state, and some inspiration from more functional languages. There certainly isn't much harm in being clear where you are initializing variables. I would say that using actual english words rather than brief non-words such as def or var makes the syntax more readable. If the keyword really bothers you that much, couldn't you fork the project and perform a global find/replace? (yes I realize that _maintaining_ a fork like that could be nightmarish, but the point still stands)