Syntax Design (2014)
I find the section on "syntactic salt" interesting:<p>> The opposite of syntactic sugar, a feature designed to make it harder to write bad code. Specifically, syntactic salt is a hoop the programmer must jump through just to prove that he knows what’s going on, rather than to express a program action.<p>This is perhaps an uncharitable way to describe it, but the concept does ring a bell.  Rust's unsafe {}, C++'s reinterpret_cast<>(), etc - all slightly verbose.  More important than jumping through hoops, the verbosity helps when <i>reading</i> code to know that something out of the ordinary is going on.