I'm with you until type inference comes into play. For example, I find the proliferation of "auto" in C++ code far uglier than Go's "foo := expression" syntax w

I'm with you until type inference comes into play. For example, I find the proliferation of "auto" in C++ code far uglier than Go's "foo := expression" syntax where most of the time you don't even need to specify a type. Since most modern languages include type inference, I can see why they are moving away from C-like syntax, even though I still prefer it in most cases.