I have to speak up in defense of minimizing typing. Sure, programming is mostly long stretches of thinking with short stretches of typing, but when you do start typing, it's usually the result of some piece of inspiration. It's especially at those times that typing lots of useless characters is a distraction. Lots of noise in the code is also distracting while reading, which we all know is what we spend most of our time doing, though you don't want it to be too short either.
In my opinion it is not the light syntax that really minimizes typing, but rather the availability of features in the language that can afford higher level abstractions.
Light syntax is useful for readability. I like it when I don't have to end each line with a semicolon, because that's just noise meant to spoon-feed the compiler. However, I hate it when the grammar of the language leads to awful gotchas. And sometimes visual clues are useful, again for readability.
I don't have RSI, so don't know from experience, but wouldn't a syntax aware IDE with autocomplete be very useful for minimizing keystrokes without necessarily minimizing the characters?
Probably. I tend to avoid IDEs because to me they feel like straight jackets and their editors tend to be inferior to standalone editors. I'll have to look around at autocomplete options for my usual languages (Erlang, Python) though -- I figured if I couldn't fit what I was using into my head, I needed to work on my head, not on my autocomplete options. But maybe I'm wrong. :-)
