> between people who want to "remove noise" by getting rid of parens, braces and semicolons, and people like me who use them as a sort of "signage" I'm not sur

> between people who want to "remove noise" by getting rid of parens, braces and semicolons, and people like me who use them as a sort of "signage" I'm not sure this characterization appropriately divides "text" from "visual" programmers. The argument I usually see for removing symbols is that the general shape and flow of your program should be able to stand on its own and that minutiae like a misplaced semicolon shouldn't be allowed to play tricks on your eyes -- it's not that the visuals are unimportant, but that they _are_ important and that too many extra symbols lead to hard-to-parse visual clutter and more easily facilitate deceptive control flow. Whether that argument has any merit or not is its own debate of course.