Comment by klysm

Readability (in the sense of "How fast can the average developer parse code in the given language?") and proneness to errors are a thing, though.

Consider, e.g., how in TypeScript object literals ({ a: b, c: d, e }), object types ({ a: b; c: d; }) and object destructuring ({ a, c, e } = … ) can all look very similar. Same thing for lambdas ((a: b) => b) and function types ((a: b) => b). Also, additional parentheses are needed to prevent the compiler from mistaking an object literal ({ … }) for a function body ({ … }) when it is returned in a lambda expression. In short: Some of TypeScript's syntactic constructs are heavily overloaded and their meaning depends on the context.

For an example of proneness to errors, consider that in Nix function calls (<function name> <param1> <param2> …) and lists ([<item1> <item 2> …]) look almost the same and it's very easy to confuse the two and mess up, e.g.

``` let foo = [ item1 myFunction "arg1" "arg2" item3 ] ```

defines a list with 5 items, not 3, due to missing parentheses around the function call.