[vidarh]

Most constructs in most languages are syntactic sugar + varying degrees of enforcing constraints. The core you need to e.g an object oriented system or first order functions or any other higher level construct is tiny. You can do closures in C for example (done it). But it gets ugly and unreadable and hard to follow.

Syntax matters hugely in making the expression of an idea concise and readable.

Blocks in Ruby (or Smalltalk..) for example are pretty much just syntactic sugar over closures, are just syntactic sugar over functions, but both makes a substantial difference in ease of use, which again affects how people tend to think about problems.

E.g we are much more sparing with closure like constructs in C, even though nothing prevents it, because it is tedious.