[x3haloed]

Amen. My current theory: data science. Data science has become much more prevalent in the last decade, and I suspect data scientists prefer English-like syntax because they're not engineers.

Engineers use language like mechanical components. It should be precise, neat, and functional. We're designing machines. I have a feeling that data scientists don't want any of that. They want to use language as a way to describe data transformations in a format that resembles a log rather than functional instructions. Much like SQL.