I feel this is like reading 100 years ago about how to make your own new type of horse & buggy, with tips like "make sure the reigns are well-fitted," when what you want to invent is a car.

The future doesn't belong to syntax because the future isn't text. The same people that would blanch at sending a string argument of "ONE" or "TWO" are indifferent about the fact that they send in "IF" to start a condition.

The reason you wouldn't send in "ONE" or "TWO" is because it makes it stiffer, more brittle and harder to manage. What can we say about the software we write? That it's stiff, brittle and hard to manage.

It's not that the future has no textual syntax at all, of course. An expression of 3+4*5 will always be easiest to express just that way. But we need to pull back from our gregarious, wide-mouthed babbling into something more meta, or I should say, more data, than text.