I suppose there's also a distinction between "beautiful in implementation/concepts available" vs. "beautiful/pleasant to work with." Harping on Perl again, one

I suppose there's also a distinction between "beautiful in implementation/concepts available" vs. "beautiful/pleasant to work with." Harping on Perl again, one could see its roots in natural language with sigils representing different kinds of "nouns", and ability to rearrange conditions to be more like spoken language ("do X if Y vs. if Y do X") as an aspiration towards "beautiful to work with." And of course the various notions of beauty can get in each others' way. But they're all a lot more fruitful to consider than a mere "yuck, too much punctuation."