This is my take as well. The older and more travelled I get the more I disdain these kinds of things. Your language syntax should do whatever the "thing" is that your language model is all about. Syntactic sugar should be for the things you do LOTS.
I watch language after language add sugar to maintain the appeal of their product, one niche group or application at a time. It turns into a death by a thousand cuts, or by a thousand sugar cubes. Most languages start out simple and appealing and understandable, an increasingly short amount of time later, they've layered on "helper" after "helper" to the point it takes a bit of expertese to consume the language effectively.
I dream of a world where we'd measure languages by the complexity of their ASTs rather than their popularity on a TIOBE or StackOverflow index.
I watch language after language add sugar to maintain the appeal of their product, one niche group or application at a time. It turns into a death by a thousand cuts, or by a thousand sugar cubes. Most languages start out simple and appealing and understandable, an increasingly short amount of time later, they've layered on "helper" after "helper" to the point it takes a bit of expertese to consume the language effectively.
I dream of a world where we'd measure languages by the complexity of their ASTs rather than their popularity on a TIOBE or StackOverflow index.