I agree that programming language notation is a barrier to entry, but I don't think that there's anything to be done about it other than good resources for lear

I agree that programming language notation is a barrier to entry, but I don't think that there's anything to be done about it other than good resources for learning it. The problem is that you still need to worry about the semantics of the language. If that's standardized across languages, then you only have one language. Consider a bunch of languages that all share a standard lambda syntax. If one of the languages has different capture semantics than another (e.g. move vs copy), then you only superficially understand the standard syntax. They mean different things. Having the same syntax doesn't buy you very much.