Programming language syntax matters. It's the interface in which the programmer writes the code, synthetic sugar can reduce the "mental overload" of a feature.

Programming language syntax matters. It's the interface in which the programmer writes the code, synthetic sugar can reduce the "mental overload" of a feature. For example, in C, the array operator is mostly synthetic sugar for pointer addition, and could be removed. Should it be removed? Of course not, cause programmers are not thinking of pointer arithmetic when indexing an array. And as much as I love lisp, it's one of the top reasons none of them ever had widespread adaption. Nobody likes having to do math like this (* (+ (sqrt 4) 2) 4).