[omouse]

Syntax does define the language. It's very difficult to write macros for an ALGOL-style language. It's possible but very difficult. Some people are put off by Common Lisp's LOOP macro or the FORMAT function and will try and avoid using the more complex features of them. Those are small examples of how the syntax encourages, or discourages, the use of language features.

Hell, I even hate doing any complex shell scripting because I can never remember the difference between [ ] and [[ ]] and ( ) when using conditionals.