A lot of programming is taste, and syntax gives you a very quick judgement about how good the language designer's taste is. How familiar they are with what we know about which syntax works well, and so on. For example if you're designing a language in 2026 that uses `type name` instead of `name: type`... that is highly suspicious.

Also syntax is the interface through which you interact with the language, so bad syntax is going to be something annoying you have to deal with constantly. Sure you'll be able to write good programs in a language with bad syntax choices, but it's going to be less fun.

> Odin’s rules, which are very similar to Python’s, are to ignore newline-based “semicolons” within brackets (( ) and [ ], and { } used as an expression or record block).

Honestly I always thought that was a bit crap in Python and I'm surprised anyone thought this was a sensible thing to copy. Really, just use semicolons. As soon as an "easy" rule becomes even vaguely difficult to remember it's better to bin it and just require explicitness, because overall that is easier.