> This is the first time I see someone seriously dismiss, and choose, a programming language based solely on its syntax.

You've never read a Lisp thread with non-Lispers, have you? :-) The amount of whining about parentheses is incredible.

To be fair, as a non-Lisper that knows Lisp, it's all about the libraries and the language-as-a-platform.

If WordPress was written in Lisp, I'm sure many more people would use it. It's sort of a chicken and egg problem, I guess.

I've also seen an incredible amount of judgmentalism applied to Objective-C's message passing syntax. Does it look foreign to a speaker of classical C? Absolutely. But I found that pressing through the initial shock, I've come to realize that it's just another language syntax, and not particularly hard to either understand or type.

I choose every language I use based on the expressiveness of the syntax. What other reason is there to choose a language?

Usually, expressivity in a programming language is not really a matter of syntactic constructs but a matter of semantic constructs. But choosing a programming language involves much more than semantic (or syntax). Depending on the situation, community, compilers and tools, libraries, consultancy houses, documentation and books, are all reasons to choose or not a language.

Some even says that the number of programmers available on the market for a language is important. I don't think it is a good reason but a related one is: your existing user base is composed of companies and consultancies with their own programmers; you can't abruptly choose a different programming language than the one they know.

I would disagree. Semantically, we're reaching a point where most popular languages have a similar feature set (semantically speaking), and as new semantic constructs are created, they're quickly ported to other languages.

I agree with you about the 'platform' of a language, though. That's one of those things that you can't get away from.

Semantics.

Why choose a language with good semantics if the syntax is awful?

Most languages today offer the same semantics - first class functions, objects, namespacing. Apart from that core, there isn't really a huge variance except for fringe languages that, generally, have severe syntactical limitations as a result.