<i>One thing abundantly clear is that syntax matters.</i><p>I feel this is like reading 100 years ago about how to make your own new type of horse &amp; buggy, with tips like &quot;make sure the reigns are well-fitted,&quot; when what you want to invent is a car.<p>The future doesn&#x27;t belong to syntax because the future isn&#x27;t text.  The same people that would blanch at sending a string argument of &quot;ONE&quot; or &quot;TWO&quot; are indifferent about the fact that they send in &quot;IF&quot; to start a condition.<p>The reason you wouldn&#x27;t send in &quot;ONE&quot; or &quot;TWO&quot; is because it makes it stiffer, more brittle and harder to manage.  What can we say about the software we write?  That it&#x27;s stiff, brittle and hard to manage.<p>It&#x27;s not that the future has no textual syntax at all, of course.  An expression of 3+4*5 will always be easiest to express just that way.  But we need to pull back from our gregarious, wide-mouthed babbling into something more meta, or I should say, more data, than text.