Jaakko (Järvi), Gaby (dos Reis), and especially Bjarne would foist syntax on us graduate students just to see how we'd "naturally" respond to language feature p

Jaakko (Järvi), Gaby (dos Reis), and especially Bjarne would foist syntax on us graduate students just to see how we'd "naturally" respond to language feature proposals quite early on in the feature development cycle. That'd provide immediate feedback, because syntax can become a pretty unworkable constraint & torpedo a great idea. That's why Bjarne's original proposal for unified initializers was changed: none of us could figure out WTF the code was saying.