Syntax is highly important, however. A poor syntax can make an otherwise decent language quite unbearable. A nice syntax doesn't make an otherwise poor language good, either.
Special chars, like PHP $, Rust's ~, Ruby's @, help the programmer tell things apart easily.
Vastly better than having to keep the information in your mind after the declaration -- and much lighter and better than full-on hungarian notation madness.
As for the braces, they never went out of style. In fact, with the exception of Python, the languages that don't use them are not that popular, compared to the ones that do. Coffescript, for example, is insignificant compared to the plain Javascript use.
