I don't think it's a matter of shock, as so much people parroting the manufactured corporate resistance to Pascal that sneakily came from AT&T (birth place of C, C++, and Unix). Being "anti Pascal" or feeling its syntax is "alien" was something embedded into the C family language culture. To the extent some people act like their brain might explode if they can't have a language with curly braces or that any new language should go that direction.

People throw their hands up because there's `begin...end` instead of curly braces.

If it was just that small difference, I would have picked up C decades ago, instead of despising it. There are all the .h files fractured off randomly from the source files, littering the landscape, the make system which never quite seems to work, the abuse of case sensitivity as a feature, the stupidity of uncounted strings ending with (maybe) a null, the abuses of macros which make things unreadable, then the pointers that are never quite explicit... char * or char, it never, ever* made sense to me. In Pascal, it's simple... @x is the address of X, x^ is what X points to. In pascal, you pass the value of an argument by default, or optionally you can pass it by reference, and the syntax doesn't change, and you don't have to play with the footgun that is pointers.

But sure, using the reserved words BEGIN and END at the bounds of a block of code break people's brains ;-)