I'm generally agreed with you about the evils of excessive syntactic sugar, though I'm not sure about this particular case (I'd have to, like, go read the blog article or something...) The general problem is that the interface that is optimal for the experienced user (terse, lots of syntax) is not best for learning. All UIs (such as programming languages -- an interface to the machine) must determine where they fall on this particular continuum.

My personal beef is the use of the Latex extended character set to typeset Haskell code in papers. It has the awesome effect of making it impossible to type in and run code if you're not already familiar with Haskell. This greatly hampered my learning of FP.