I disagree, I believe it is properly using abstractions to write simpler, more straight-forward code. I think of syntactic sugar as 1-to-1 replacements. For example, the -> in C and C++ is syntactic sugar for a dereference followed by a field access (ptr->field; (*ptr).field). If it's not a 1-to-1 replacement, then it's more likely to be an actual abstraction.