It's not so much that they're afraid of it, it's that changing syntax imposes a mental tax on them for no reason. Once you've been programming in a language for more than a few months, you no longer think in terms of tokens. Rather, your muscle memory now has constructs for "This is what a variable binding looks like. This is what a for-each loop looks like. This is what a method call looks like," and you can just think in terms of the desired semantics rather than how to type that into an editor.
A language with a new and unfamiliar syntax requires that you unlearn all these key-bindings and start thinking on the level of tokens again. It's understandable that given the choice, people who have already graduated from this stage would rather not repeat it.
A language with a new and unfamiliar syntax requires that you unlearn all these key-bindings and start thinking on the level of tokens again. It's understandable that given the choice, people who have already graduated from this stage would rather not repeat it.