I like the point. And not being able to use if(0) (as in C) has caught tons of bugs (like writing "if(x=0)" instead of "if(x==0)"). There are ton of things that sounded convenient in the early history of programming languages that are really anti-patterns.

For example:

  Confusing ints with booleans.
  Confusing ints with pointers (no longer done, thank goodness).
  allowing assignments to have a non-void type ("x=1.0" should be of type void, not type double).
  Poor choice of assignment and test equals (would be nice not to use "=" but to force ":=" and "==").
  Pverly aggressive type coercion and autoboxing.
  Integer division using the same symbol as floating point (many end-users want 5/2 to be 2.5 as the answer, mostly you want it to be 3 if you are doing loop-foo).
  Making "else if" and if-braces mere convention.
  Allowing null way too many places.
  Automatic variable decleration.