Ad hoc hieroglyphs that change from project to project indeed make it harder to read code. But as long as they are the core part of the language and they represent orthogonal features (ie they don’t bloat the number of ways you can represent identical solutions), I don’t see why it should be a problem. On the contrary, putting less visual weight on tokens with smaller information content looks natural.

Actually they do, particularly for reading, as they separate language boilerplate from actual content.

For example, to call a function, we just use the name of the function and parentheses, rather than saying "call". This is useful, because it allows the reader to focus on what is of interest.

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so, you recommend cobol?