What gets me is the "I'll keep an open mind" type of comments
I think the 'open mind' is indeed the correct attitude here. If a very experienced programmer with stellar credentials comes along and says 'this is a good solution to the problems I've faced in my career', I'm inclined to listen very patiently even if my first impressions are negative.
This doesn't mean that you are wrong about the syntax, but perhaps there is something useful below the surface that's worth digging to discover. Maybe the right solution will be blend of a modern bracket-free syntax and the guts of something like Go.
For me, the syntax isn't really that important. Probably this is just due to my brain damage from coping with C.
I think that after they add some sort of generics, ie. parametric polymorphism, the language is semantically quite close to a modern ML-style language like OCaml, but with a syntax familiar to C hackers and a native support for concurrency.
I think the 'open mind' is indeed the correct attitude here. If a very experienced programmer with stellar credentials comes along and says 'this is a good solution to the problems I've faced in my career', I'm inclined to listen very patiently even if my first impressions are negative.
This doesn't mean that you are wrong about the syntax, but perhaps there is something useful below the surface that's worth digging to discover. Maybe the right solution will be blend of a modern bracket-free syntax and the guts of something like Go.
For me, the syntax isn't really that important. Probably this is just due to my brain damage from coping with C.