Comparison of equivalent snippets in various programming languages leads to a stable conclusion about what developers like: punctuation. Namespaces/packages, object hierarchies, composing reusable pieces into the desired aggregate, and so on are relegated to the despicable category of "ceremony". Better to use built-in punctuation syntax than to type letter sequences that signify items in the standard libraries. Developers don't hate objects. They hate typing names. Hand them a method and they'll moan. Hand them a new operator that accomplishes the same purpose and they'll grin. What's the most noticeable difference between Groovy and Java syntax, in many cases? Punctuation as shortcuts. Why do some of them have trouble following Lisp-y programming languages? Containment in place of punctuation.
Oddly enough, some of the same developers also immediately switch opinions when they encounter operators overloaded with new meanings by code. Those punctuation marks are confusing, unlike the good punctuation marks that are built in to the language. Exceedingly common behavior can still be unambiguous if its method calls are replaced by punctuation, but behavior of user modules is comparatively rare so the long names are less ambiguous than overloaded operators. "By this module's definition of plus '+', the first argument is modified? Aaaaaghhhh! I wish the module writer had just used a call named 'append' instead!"
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