SOEL – A programming language that's a language

This idea came to me in a dream. The starting point is a neuroscience finding that's been replicated across multiple fMRI studies: programming languages are not languages. When you read code, your brain routes it through the Multiple Demand network, the same circuitry used for logic puzzles and spatial reasoning. The language network stays dark. Your brain sees through the syntactic dressing and recognizes code for what it is: a deterministic puzzle, not communication.

This means no programming language has ever actually been a language in the neurological sense. Even "natural language programming" efforts like Inform 7 fail the test, the programmer still maintains a mental model of state machines and boolean flags, which is pure MD network territory.

SOEL is an experiment: what if the source code were genuine natural language prose — narratives with entities, intent, ambiguity, and social context and the compiler handled the translation to executable code? You write something closer to a specification document than a program. The compiler semantically encodes it, flags genuine ambiguities as compiler errors (which you resolve through dialog, not syntax fixes), and generates GHC-compilable Haskell.

It's impractical, unreliable, and fascinating. The theoretical foundation is in SPEC.md if you want the full neuroscience deep-dive.