I've been recently somewhat surprised at how much syntax means even to experienced developers. Just look at the very positive responses CoffeeScript has receive

I've been recently somewhat surprised at how much syntax means even to experienced developers. Just look at the very positive responses CoffeeScript has received, especially when compared to the criticism Dart gathered with regards to its syntax (Yeah, those weren't the only complaints, but they did make up a large percentage). Personally, the whole thing made me realize syntax is more or less meaningless to me. I was never really spending that much time making, or correcting, syntax related problems when writing JavaScript in the first place. Though when using CoffeeScript, I was spending a substantially larger amount of time trying to find ways of doing things that I knew were possible in regular JS, but generally avoided in CoffeeScript -- things like mixins, using closures for restricting access to internal members, having members named 'on', etc. In the end I was spending too much time looking at the JavaScript output to see what was going on continue with CS. Its idioms make the popular subset of JS really great, at the cost of making things outside of it less 'natural' than they are in plain JS.