I sympathise with the syntax often getting in the way. On the flip side I find untyped languages opaque, leaving me to guess what code actually does. Lisps are a great offender because macros, syntactic primitives and functions look the same but behave differently, and without type signatures it becomes a mess.

The thing with type systems is that they only reveal the gestalt of something that’s already there. All languages have types. It’s just that many don’t bother to correct you.

I tried to write a language parser in Guile, but when I couldn’t figure out what the different data structures actually looked like I eventually gave up.