>>67
Agreed, but we need some kind of middle ground. Perl oneliners that look like
%$#^**$(%(^$#@{}[]
are also not exactly desirable (especially for a newbie).
The point is that someone who is new to programming needs to focussing on things like control structures. As a beginner, what you need is to learn about assignments, about conditional statements and loops. You should not have to worry about stupid syntactic stuff.
Let's not forget that the C-like languages have one of the worst possible assignment symbols possible (namely the = sign, used for equality in pretty much every single other field). Also conditional expressions like b?x:y are not exactly elegant syntax, nor are these shorthands relevant to newbie programmers.
These syntactic monstrosities will hinder anyone new to programming. When you have the basics down, switching to a different language is trivial.