From decades of experience, I know intuitively that they are, but I find myself unable to formulate a concise description of what exactly is wrong with this approach.
If you treat them as English you'll get burned. You have to still treat them as very precise formal languages where apparently trivial/irrelevant details are significant, and minor hard-to-spot mistakes will break your program.
Having more explicitly formal/structured syntax makes it easier to distinguish the different parts of the language, make sense of the details, and figure out what is or isn't allowed.
The best description I have for languages like this, e.g. Applescript, is that they are "read only languages" (in the opposite direction old-style Perl has been called a "write only language"): That is, if you have an already written program in hand it will be easier for a complete novice to read (at least, single isolated lines of code will be). But writing new programs is a huge pain in the ass.
In my opinion it’s because of english’s evolution over time. Something that might have made perfect sense in the past becomes an antiquated way of saying the same thing in the future. It also deliberately encodes the authors belief about how language should be spoken ignoring any regional variances you see in the real world.
When you abstract away the English meaning of code into something new and unchanging, you provide stability not seen in natural language.
In fact, given that this is how all the languages that humans are already familiar with work, it's hard to see why this wouldn't be the best approach for constructing a programming language.
- humans can ask back questions to clarify any ambiguity; computers don't have the capacity to understand ambiguity, let alone asking for clarification.
- computers are trusted to work w/o failure almost 100% of the time. humans err (to be human is to err, anyway), so we'd never put a human in charge of critical things we use computers for.
For instance, the poem, or should I say program using the example in the post has several different interpretations, and at least some of those teachers would say are flabbergastingly incorrect.