title: Why is Syntactic Sugar sometimes considered a bad thing?
body: <p>Syntactic sugar, IMHO, generally makes programs much more readable and easier to understand than coding from a very minimalistic set of primitives.  I don't really see a downside to good, well thought out syntactic sugar.  Why do some people basically think that syntactic sugar is at best superfluous and at worst something to be avoided?</p>
  
  <p>Edit:  I didn't want to name names, but since people asked, it seems like most C++ and Java programmers, for example, frankly don't care about their language's utter lack of syntactic sugar.  In a lot of cases, it's not necessarily that they just like other parts of the language enough to make the lack of sugar worth the tradeoff, it's that they really <strong>don't care</strong>.  Also, Lisp programmers seem almost proud of their language's strange notation (I won't call it syntax because it technically isn't), though in this case, it's more understandable because it allows Lisp's metaprogramming facilities to be as powerful as they are.</p>