When I started out programming, it was Basic followed quickly by Turbo Pascal. I tried looking at C and C++ a bit later, but for years I found them hard to read

When I started out programming, it was Basic followed quickly by Turbo Pascal. I tried looking at C and C++ a bit later, but for years I found them hard to read, with the natural language keywords of Pascal feeling much more, well, natural. As I grew more experienced though, this has shifted. I took some time to really learn C and C++, and while I still use Pascal in my day job (Delphi), I now feel the natural language keywords "get in my way" a bit, and I prefer the brevity of curly braces and such. For me, this isn't about typing, I don't think that's a very interesting metric and I spend far more time thinking about my code than writing it regardless of language. The milliseconds saved typing "{" vs "begin" is irrelevant to me. For me it's about parsing. Once I trained my brain on the curly braces, the begin/end pairs take so much space so to speak, they kinda obscure what's really interesting. But before that, the natural language keywords helped me because my eyes and brain were trained to recognize them already. That said, I've looked at Rust code and yeah, I'm having that initial C/C++ vibe again, where it all looks like a mess of "random" symbols thrown together. I'd have to spend some serious time learning Rust for that to look acceptable I think.