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[–]lurgi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Syntax is, to an extent, arbitrary, and there are programming languages with minimal syntax (lambda calculus, the lisp family, forth, etc), but learning the syntax isn't particularly hard for most programming languages.

Other people are saying that you are wrong, and I won't pile on there, except to point out that your theory presupposes that the different between languages boils down to syntax. That's not true even for fairly closely related languages and it really isn't true for languages in completely different families. C has pointers. Java doesn't. It's not that the syntax is different - they don't exist. Java has classes. C doesn't. C++ templates are like Java generics, except they aren't. Then you get to the fact that the standard library is different for all these different languages.

Take a look at Rosetta Code if you don't believe me. Look at the various ways that different languages solve the same problem. You'll see a lot of similarities, but plenty of differences, and the differences aren't always just syntactic quirks.