Actually, I don't know if you've ever met Richard Stallman (or at least have been to one of his many lectures or presentations throughout the world), he is a pretty funny guy who appears to have a good sense of humour and is not some kind of egotistical religious cult figure (unless he is in his Church of Emacs mode) like many people like to depict him as. Sure, he is extreme, but history has shown him to be correct quite a lot as well.

Some languages already encourage alternate markup styles. For example, literate programming in Haskell uses LaTeX-formatted source files. Some Haskell compilers also support unicode syntax so you can do "" instead of "->".