Operators are probably written using special characters in order to provide a suitable level of terseness. I feel it really can make things more compact and easy to understand.

Of course, I'm very much of a C programmer, and C is kind of good too at using operators in a terse manner.

If C required

    foo >>= 4;

to be written as

    foo = foo shift_right 4;

then it just wouldn't be as nice and fun to program in. Even more so when using the pointer-dereferencing and pre/post-increment operators, or combinations.