You can also figure out if it's C-like or Lisp-like, and so on from looking at syntax.
So you can deduce something just from a line count of simple program alone - for one such deduction is an answer to a question "are there at least some attempts to provide useful defaults?"
A small sample on the front page will not tell me if a language is good enough, but it can give me an idea if it's worth spending more time reading up on it or not.
For instance, C and Go are easy because they do not hide anything and what one sees is pretty much unaffected by what one does not see. On the other hand, because those languages do not permit to build efficient abstractions they are also harder to read because each given sample, although unambiguous, perform very little.
Other languages like C++ (despite a syntax that is close to that of C) or Haskell, allow the behavior of the simplest operators, including the application and the sequencing operators, to behave in unfamiliar way or hide subtle but meaningful details, which makes understanding any small bit of code like a gamble (one has to assume some behavior for operators, constructors...). On the other hand, they allow to build abstractions that make programs more terse and therefore easier to read.
In this trade of, none of the alternatives depends significantly on the syntax.
I think a lot of people have associated obscure syntax with bad programming experience because of perl, the language which syntax became synonymous for bad. Indeed, this is a case where the syntax can be teacherous, but still the language is made more problematic by its semantic, that tries hard to give a meaning to any use of any variable in any context, this delaying runtime errors even more than other runtime typed languages and even masking them entirely (then performing something else than intended).
I think this mental association must be done away with.
There are of course actual blockers to readability, like usage of similar-looking sigils and poor system library naming, but otherwise the syntax really doesn't tell you any useful information. It's the semantics that tell you how it'll all fall apart
Francky, syntax has little to no incidence about how well a given language fits a domain problem, and in my experience the only thing syntax is really important to, is how attractive the language is to programmers who judge languages by their cover.
I remember having read somewhere that the initial versions of lisp where missing an actual syntax, and that it was planned to add one later, but that until then users would have to write directly the AST in an ugly syntax full of parentheses and devoid of familiar syntactic landmarks. Well, time passed, an nobody cared enough to add that user friendlier syntax :)
