I like knowing the reason for changes, being able to voice opposition and bring up problems. Ok, so Open Source means you can theoretically join in the development. I don't know, but take myself as an example. From 0 to core development in three years. Ok, Perl uses lots of funny characters.
People find it noisy and unnecessary.
Sometimes you need to have big blocks of text in your code. Numbers are often stored as strings, and you often want to use a number as a string. For this reason restricting language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best dangerous.