Funny, my experience is that learning to read the idioms (and write the most convenient idioms) of the language is an upfront penalty, and once you've made the investment things start moving smoothly.

Of course, it's everyone's privilege to decide which penalty they'd prefer to pay, and that doesn't mean there aren't language features that can make put it on a new order of expressiveness.

But are we talking about those features? Or are we talking about "aesthetics/readability"? If it's the later, that's probably a different thing, and I have my doubts that it's anything objective. Particularly if it has much to do with which specific tokens indicate the beginning/ending of blocks or enclosing arguments to a function.