[shasta]

The problem with this analysis is that it discounts the possibility of interactivity. There are many who cannot think through the logical steps needed to complete a task, but can watch a system stepping through a task, stop it when it seems to go wrong, and provide an explanation as to what's wrong about it. There are a whole lot of problems for which this trial and error process would converge to a mostly working solution.

Hell, there are many programmers who code things this way - try it, change it, repeat. Natural language would just allow non-programmers who aren't familiar with the syntax to join in on this process. Continued practice would likely improve the reasoning abilities of the user and make the process faster.

[blahedo]

I have no problem with this idea of iterative refinement, and indeed I actively teach it. There are certainly students who pick up the syntax more slowly, but this is largely a matter of degree. But the students I refer to above have trouble even identifying what's wrong about an intermediate value or where things went off the rails or what a correct answer would even look like. They're more common than you (as a hacker) would ever believe unless you teach intro CS. They can be taught at least enough to pass CS1, but it's not easy and "natural language programming" will not help them with the things they need help on. (Might actively hurt, actually.)