[jgfoot]

OK, maybe writing arbitrary English as a program won't work; but, I can think of a lot of occasions where it would be useful for a computer program to be understandable by any English speaker. I'm thinking of lawyers, who want to be able to review whether a program conforms with legal requirements, or managers, who want to be able to confirm that business logic is doing what they want it to do. Zed Shaw kind of hints at this in his classic "ACLs are Dead" talk, where he talks about using metaprogramming to make Ruby syntax more readable for lawyers.

[dinkumthinkum]

No, to be honest they should just learn to program then. Maybe what you're talking about would be great if all programs were 100 line simple things but that's not reality. If we want to solve the "lawyers need to read and understand computer programs for legal reasons" problem, it makes more sense to just educate lawyers on programming. In some ways this is like saying lawyers need to be electrical engineers, civil engineers, etc. We need physics to more Englishy and less Mathy. :) I jest but I'm serious. For business rules, perhaps this simple case could be expressed with a specialized DSL or config depending on your needs but I think this is a little tertiary.