Of course it doesn't! But I'm interested to know if that's also the case when reading cooking recipes or instruction manuals?
It's interesting to think about, and makes me suspect that this is why I tend to prefer writing my own recipes out as tersely as possible, particularly if I know the general procedure. At this point I don't need to be told to preheat an oven or to scrape down the sides of the stand mixer, so I'll just write down things like "Creaming method, 350° in 8x8 cake pan." I might even start writing them in pseudocode now.
My partner takes it a step further with her cranberry sauce recipe; the instructions just say "C'mon."
Oh well. Time to go code golfing!
A program can also be seen as an awkward natural language, conveying programmer's intention to other programmers, of course. But it's a different modality of the code.
Exactly. That's why laws or contracts written by lawyers are so verbose. Think of a rent contract or a software license like GPL.
Contrast with WTFPL and similar...
My argument would be that legalese with its strict "May" "Should"s and all that could be sufficiently similar to a (verbose) programming language.
Anecdotally, I certainly have entered "debugging" mode when trying to check if a specific clause of a contract was applicable to my situation before, rather than trying to interpret it liberally.
Of course, anecdote, and only demonstrates that the (my) brain _can_ operate "programmingly" when reading legalese, not that it does so "naturally".