Major syntactic structures definitely have an influence on my language choices. Outside of compilation and runtime model, modeling the domain (both data and procedures) changes drastically between paradigms. Syntax is what enables or hamstrings different modeling paradigms.

My two biggest considerations when picking a language are:

- How well does it support value semantics? (Can I pass data around as data and know that it is owned by the declaring scope, or am I chained to references, potential nulls, and mutable handles with lifetimes I must consider? Can I write expression-oriented code?)

- How well does it support linear pipelining for immutable values? (If I want to take advantage of value semantics, there needs to be a way to express a series of computations on a piece of data in-order, with no strange exceptions because one procedure or another is a compiler-magic symbol that can't be mapped, reduced, filtered, etc. In other words, piping operators or Universal Function Call Syntax.)

I lean on value semantics, expression-oriented code, and pipelining to express lots of complex computations in a readable and maintainable manner, and if a language shoots me in the foot there, it's demoralizing.