I mostly agree and I think this is the reason why languages like Python or Ruby succeeded so much. People simply want to use a beautiful, easy to type, easy to read language. They don't care that it's slow and actually quite terrible at runtime and hard to test and so on. They want it anyway because it looks good and feels good. This is also why I've said from the start that I don't believe in ziglang despite all its features. It simply looks too ugly and you can't make that go away. One counter point could possibly be that golang code is also a bit ugly and it succeeded on its technical merits. But it's not quite as bad and the ugliness is voided by a lot of language simplicity.
Plenty of engineers prefer the appearance of code with heavy use of curly brackets. I thunk aesthetic tastes in the programming community are rather split and doubt there is a clear preference for Python style appearance over Zig style appearance.
The failure of Zig to catch on is simply because it’s in a harder space to catch on (low level / systems programming). Whereas new web languages frequently catch on, Rust and Go are the only ones that managed to break through against the C/C++ monopoly with Zig, Nim, D etc. failing. And Pascal and its derivatives also have fallen by the wayside so it’s not an appearance issue.
