Agree that making keywords look like functions is weird and bad, but I also loathe languages that insist on using special chars for things that are better expressed with words. C# is my daily driver and I like how it calls pass-by-reference stuff "ref". And likewise, while I can see the appeal of making namespace and member lookups distinct, I've never liked the readability of C++ :: syntax, and I learned C++ fairly early on in my career.