I know Perl, C, C++ and PHP quite well, but I'd never, ever call C-like syntax a plus.
It's astonishing how feeble modern PHP is, that to comapre strings you often have to use strcmp. In 2017. It's like all the cruft of ANSI C with a whole bunch of $ characters spiked in.
C-style syntax is fairly popular [1]. If it had lisp syntax or haskell syntax most people would complain that they can't figure out what's going on without learning all that syntax.
>that to comapre strings you often have to use strcmp
For equality === works just fine. For < and > there is no one obviously correct order, so it's entirely reasonable to use functions for that.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_C-family_programming_l...
Well, versus whatever abomination bash uses, it's quite readable…
It's the most common syntax pattern of popular languages. Statistically, more developers know a language with a "C-like" syntax than Lisp, Haskell, Erlang..