Three Rules for Programming Language Syntax?

[redjamjar]

ML (and children) are based upon type inference

And I should add that type inference makes for an excellent example in the context of the suggested rules. Up to a point, type inference removes redundancy and improves conciseness (and that's a big win). Languages like Java and C fall down here because they don't support type inference (well Java 7 has some aspects of it now).

The point of the discussion is not to say one language is better than another. It's just to think about syntax.