I guess they didn’t explore a Haskell (or a Lisp, Prolog (which always surprises me by looking so clean that you don’t think anything can be going on), Python,

I guess they didn’t explore a Haskell (or a Lisp, Prolog (which always surprises me by looking so clean that you don’t think anything can be going on), Python, Pascal etc) style because it scares c/c++ programmers generally. And then they would have to fight harder for adoption than they had to now. Personally I think many styles, like the Haskell-y you show here, would be far more pleasing on the eye; luckily we live in a time where it is not too hard to create either a different compiler frontend, or, easier, a translator (transpiler, but I don’t like the word as it only translates, hence it takes too much credit being called transpiler).