Wait. Are you a Cobol programamer? Your argument has nothing to do with ' per se; it's completely generic for every "symbol" in a language.

    https://www.mainframestechhelp.com/tutorials/cobol/arithmetic-statements.htm

"Confusing" is mostly a question of familiarity; "ugly" one of taste. When you're designing a language's syntax, there is a tension between making the language feel recognizable to beginners/non-users and communicating important information saliently to experts. The former errs on the side of least-common-denominator symbols and explicit constructions, while the latter errs on the side of expression density and implicit understanding.

Language features that appeal to beginners and outsiders naturally aid in language adoption, even if they actively work against expert practitioners. So, funnily enough, we should a priori expect the zeitgeist opinion to favor lowest-common-denominator languages features and shun high-utility but "complex" ones.

That is a real shame, however. As a business or whatever, instead of maximizing for ease of onboarding, I want to maximize for facility in exploring the end-goal problem domain, i.e. expert work. Instead of picking a "readable" language, I want to pick one that increases our ability to find simple solutions to complex-seeming problems, conventionally readable or not.

IMHO, baseline languages like Python are great for writing down what you already think but terrible for iterating on your understanding, and 95% of our work as engineers is (should be?) changing our understanding of the problem to fit reality as it bumps us in the face.