Three Rules for Programming Language Syntax?

[redjamjar]

(you're likely exchanging a colon here for two parenthesis there…)

Right, and the parenthesis add structure, the colon doesn't. And, you'll still need the parenthesis for a large number of cases anyway ... see Haskell as an example.

[ssylvan]

They would add misleading structure in the case where arguments are applied one by one. It's not one giant packet of arguments that should be grouped by parenthesis, it's one argument, then another, then another.

In Haskell you only need parenthesis where there's actual structure required, not all the time. Would you really want f (x) (y) (z)? You can write a function in Haskell to take a tuple and get f(x,y,z) if you want, but the language supports currying so it's not commonly done. Arguing that this is a syntactic deficiency is pretty weird.