I think it's a subconscious habit of how your eyes traverse the code. Your mind has been trained to skip over a lot of those symbols and get the meaning from t

I think it's a subconscious habit of how your eyes traverse the code. Your mind has been trained to skip over a lot of those symbols and get the meaning from the surrounding code, and in the near term, it costs extra work to suppress that habit and actually see the symbols. Over the long term, I don't think symbols are harder to read than keywords. C itself provides some evidence for that: imagine reading C code if experience with another language had conditioned you to look past * and &. That would be terribly confusing, but for an experienced C programmer, those symbols leap out of the code at you because you know that they carry a lot of meaning.