@snarfmason @mattly yeah, I think you have to consider differently what's "better" in isolation vs better in context

if everyone switched to L->R consistently one day by magic: great; wonderful

if you have the one language trying to do it right in a sea of wrongness: maybe it's better to trade a few extra characters for increased clarity

even with something like smalltalk you're bound to have programmers whose job involves 95% javascript and 5% smalltalk; they would definitely rather have a syntax error than an incorrect result when they forget for a minute which language they're using