I agree with most of what you say, and I'm sorry I should have been clear that I don't think your comment is without merit. In truth, I am reacting more to the general direction I see in PL discussion on HN (which is what I should have said but was too lazy to find other examples).

> To take it further, I'm pretty sure if you only absolutely only wanted features for manipulating things

I feel like lisp fits this bill to some degree. Being the AST itself it is "without syntax" to some degree. I wonder if you dislike Lisps? I can't really tell you what this means with regards to our discussion I'm just curious.

> And I, too, like programming language and I feel what makes a language as such cool/useful/etc is that you express a computer's action in a compact, elegant and clear fashion for one's fellow human beings.

Definitely! I would never suggest that we should entirely ignore how the syntax affects our ability to read the code but, to borrow the lisp example again, I don't care about typing lots of parenthesis if I'm otherwise effective.

Again, your earlier comment is not unfounded and I appreciate where you are coming from.