What makes a program easy to read is not its syntax but its semantic, that dictates how much context one has to keep in mind to be able to understand a small fr

What makes a program easy to read is not its syntax but its semantic, that dictates how much context one has to keep in mind to be able to understand a small fraction of code. For instance, C and Go are easy because they do not hide anything and what one sees is pretty much unaffected by what one does not see. On the other hand, because those languages do not permit to build efficient abstractions they are also harder to read because each given sample, although unambiguous, perform very little. Other languages like C++ (despite a syntax that is close to that of C) or Haskell, allow the behavior of the simplest operators, including the application and the sequencing operators, to behave in unfamiliar way or hide subtle but meaningful details, which makes understanding any small bit of code like a gamble (one has to assume some behavior for operators, constructors...). On the other hand, they allow to build abstractions that make programs more terse and therefore easier to read. In this trade of, none of the alternatives depends significantly on the syntax. I think a lot of people have associated obscure syntax with bad programming experience because of perl, the language which syntax became synonymous for bad. Indeed, this is a case where the syntax can be teacherous, but still the language is made more problematic by its semantic, that tries hard to give a meaning to any use of any variable in any context, this delaying runtime errors even more than other runtime typed languages and even masking them entirely (then performing something else than intended). I think this mental association must be done away with.