I think people actually prefer terse syntax, but only for things that are already familiar to them. Most languages use "+" instead of "plus", because the audien

I think people actually prefer terse syntax, but only for things that are already familiar to them. Most languages use "+" instead of "plus", because the audience knows it already. Some languages (I'm thinking of Rust's Result/try/? syntax) have gradually evolved some parts of themselves from verbose to terse as people became more familiar with the concepts, so I would not be surprised if Python/NumPy follows a similar path. Python only added a symbol for matrix multiplication ("@") in version 3.5, probably because many of its _current_ users are already familiar with the concept. When Python was first introduced, it seemed to be more of a Perl or Bash replacement, so dedicated syntax for matrix multiplication would have been weird.