I also find curly braces/parens/etc annoying to type, but recently had my mind blown when I saw a typing tutor program that recommended using left-shift to create those characters.

For 35+ years I’ve been using right-shift for things on the right side of the board, cranking my hand and stretching my fingers and complaining about programming languages with poor typing ergonomics.

It’s taking forever to break the habit, but so far it feels so much better.

Ruby and Julia use the 'end' keyword in code blocks. A bit less noise compared to Pascal's 'begin' and 'end' syntax.

> For me, "begin" and "end" are actually much more comfortable to type,

Type, maybe, but they are visual noise when you read code.

BEGIN and END are also not as easy to match with editors/IDE's as pairs of symbols.

> because everyone is already familiar with at least one curly braced language.

so, logically, they must have learned how to use {} in the first place, probably with few problems.

i have taught god-knows how many people c and c++ (used to be a commercial trainer for those languages) and i can assure you that very, very few, if any, had problems with {}.