[jzwinck]

Some examples might be COBOL, Java, BASIC, and Logo.

Of course reading any program still requires a mind accustomed to logical thought. A subsistence farmer has a different sort of "no formal training" than an 18 year old taking Chemisty courses.

In any case there is no need to worry...the important thing is the ideas not the syntax. And the useful ideas tend to be conveyed through time in multiple languages.

[int_19h]

I can't speak for COBOL and Logo... but Java, really? When you're looking at a hello world program in it, 80% of it doesn't make sense to someone not familiar with the concept - import? class? static? void?

BASIC is even worse in many respects. It starts being deceptively simple, but do you think that someone looking at these two lines:

   PRINT a, b;
   PRINT a; b

would be able to tell the difference? Or, say, what does this do?

   LINE (0, 0) - (100, 100),, BF 

(no, it doesn't draw a line)

And then if we're talking about classic BASIC, you have to remember that A% is integer while A$ is string etc. None of that is at all obvious.

Or, say, you see this:

   NAME x AS y

A reasonable guess would be that it renames a variable, or maybe creates an alias, right? But no - it actually renames a file with a name corresponding to a value in variable x, to a new name corresponding to a value in variable y. And many BASIC dialects will even helpfully stringize it for you, if the variables were, say, integers.