> the majority of people reading code examples will nitpick minor pet peeves in the syntax and completely detract from the actual new ideas and concepts that go way beyond just the syntax

I believe that, regardless of our personal preferences, the reality is that syntax is a major criteria for adopting a programming language.

Some people have trouble following Lisp code, and won't touch your project if it looks like chat. Others will have the opposite reaction and have their interest captured instead.

Likewise, some people love the ABC and Python model of syntactically important leading whitespace while others passionately prefer some sort of brackets (for this purpose brackets include parentheses, curly braces, square brackets, words like BEGIN and END, etc).

Some love short, mnemonic built-in variables and short built-in function names of the sort you see in APL or Perl (although Perl has longer-named versions optionally for a lot of things). Others love long, self-documenting names for keywords and functions. They might want no built-in variables at all.