[porqupine]

Despite the amount of criticism on here (and while I agree the article is a bit over the top), I do think I am strongly partial to this sentiment nevertheless.

I think part of the problem is that amongst coders (a much greater population than that of people doing real research in computer science) fluency in a number of arcane syntaxes is perceived as something 'cool', finally it's a standard that's been ingrained for years and years.

But the amount of say 'command-line-tool' or 'library' specific syntax, that must be re-learned for a new tool (which you might use once in a month, or a library you might use for one function, is very often a giant time sink). It's not cool. It's not intellectually interesting to memorize syntax.