Ofc it boils down to familiarity. But making a custom version of, say structs is just a weird design. The mainstream struct syntax is something everyone knows, and zig made all kinds of weird decisions around it. Same goes for @SpecialThing, looks like PHP to me. Multiline strings are also a weird addition. The list goes on.

> But making a custom version of, say structs is just a weird design.

This I don't understand? Zig structs are pretty much the same as in any other language, except that the declaration can be more flexible by building the struct type via comptime code (e.g. how Zig does generics) - and Zig groups structs and namespaces under the same keyword (which hardly matters in practice though).

> @SpecialThing

...not any weirder than `__builtin` keywords in Clang or GCC and at least in Zig it's obvious that anything starting with a `@` is a builtin, while in Clang/GCC the `__` is not explicitly reserved for builtins. ObjC also uses a leading `@` to separate ObjC keywords from regular C keywords. Agreed that the @-noise can get a bit excessive in Zig though (mainly because implicit casting is heavily restricted, at least compared to C).

> Multiline strings are also a weird addition

AFAIK the 'weird' multiline syntax is for keeping the parser simple and fast. Multi-line-strings themselves are a good feature to have though.

In general, if Zig code starts to look too 'noisy', that's usually a sign that the code should be simplified.

I definitely don't agree with all design decisions in Zig, but the syntax is mostly fine (my main critique points are that Zig often tries to lean too much into 'design purity' than 'programmer convenience' and that parts of the stdlib are too 'object oriented'.