Let me guess, you were never a Perl programmer? Trust me, if you have a Perl background, a lot of that syntax looks pretty familiar (the @ sigil in particular denotes an array).
I think all programming languages look alien if you’re unfamiliar with their syntax.
Having come from a Pascal background, C felt weird with all of its curly braces. Then after getting familiarity with C and its ilk, Python felt weird. In fact one of the reasons I was reluctant to learn Python was because I was good enough at Perl that I didn’t see the need to learn Python. I had a similar repulsion to LISP too, until I learned s-expressions and now I can see beauty in LISPs too.
Bar for esoteric languages, whose goals are typically different from a general purpose language, most languages are designed to be useful. So once you spend a little time in it you do start to appreciate some of syntactical quirks you once perceived as ugliness
…or at least that’s been my experience with most languages (and I’ve learned a lot of programming languages over the years)
