[flomble]

I find the point about "ugly" syntax interesting, because I'm generally quite indifferent to that sort of thing, but my experience tends to indicate that it's very important to people.

Facebook created ReasonML, which is just a different syntax for OCaml (I think the AST parsed from it is interchangeable with one parsed from OCaml), purely because it's less alienating to people who are used to writing C-style code.

I'd say though, that generally, people who are interested in "niche" programming languages are less likely to be put off by syntax than people who have only been exposed to the more mainstream languages, which is why their preferences are less likely to be the ones reflected whenever mass adoption is a goal of language designers.