[lmm]

> the world prefers C. Five out of ten TIOBE's most popular languages have C-like syntax.

I don't know which five you're classifying that way, but even for languages that started off C-like the trend is in the direction of less C-like. Even for C++ the big popular changes recently have been things like auto; similarly for Java, and C# always had a more lightweight syntax for expressing values. And certainly JavaScript has an object literal syntax good enough that people use it separately. Python is admittedly weirdly bad for writing values in; I wonder if that's why Scons has more or less failed.