My experience was originally with Algol style languages: Pascal, Basic, PL1, etc., but I didn’t really mind C syntax. My big complaint with C was/is that the only way you could call by reference is to pass a pointer. I never was able to deal with pointer syntax without having to go to the reference manual every time I needed to use a pointer, or try to follow someone else’s code that used them. I haven’t minded programming in Java and Javascript which are both C syntax.