Some say (for example Moore) that arithmetic is only a tiny part of programming and don't deserve special syntax (especially with a language that lacks C-style for loops).
Programming languages (at least the not-so-academic kind) need to mesh with the problem-spaces being solved, and there are definitely some contexts where most of the work is encoding and applying arithmetic rules.
I haven't been posting here long, so I wasn't sure if it was acceptable to type 'fuck.' So I self-censored by replacing it with asterisks, which hackernews promptly ate. So yes, you are right of course.
