Somewhere in between. There actually is a level of demand for languages which are annoying to use; whether this is annoying syntax or annoying semantics isn't m

Somewhere in between. There actually is a level of demand for languages which are annoying to use; whether this is annoying syntax or annoying semantics isn't much of a distinction, they dovetail. But more than that, there's demand for ML clones (but with curly braces), and neither ML nor generic-curly-brace is the strongest foundation to build readability on, unfortunately.