It seems obvious that bad syntax harms readability, in that it's very easy to construct an example of a programming language that is truly unreadable (use comma

It seems obvious that bad syntax harms readability, in that it's very easy to construct an example of a programming language that is truly unreadable (use commas to indicate generics, everything must be upper case, backslash to call functions and pipe to separate arguments, the letter `H` is used to start a class declaration, etc - the Intercal of syntaxes). But the reverse seems more difficult to argue: that there is some ideal syntax that is objectively more reasonable than all other syntaxes. I have preferences (do/end blocks feel like unnecessary noise, I like my types to be written inline in my functions, angle brackets feel right for generics), and some of them even have a veneer of logic behind them (significant indentation is a nuisance when I want to paste a block of code that has the wrong indentation). But clearly other people have different preferences, because they keep on designing languages that don't fit my ideal aesthetics. The other side of this is that the more I write different languages, the less important syntax becomes. The places where I appreciate the syntax of a particular language are usually because the syntax fits particularly well with the language's semantics, rather than because the syntax itself is good or bad. Partial application in ML-family languages is syntactically very neat, but I don't feel the need to remove parentheses from Javascript because of it. What I really like is partial application, and using space as the function application operator works well with those semantics.