Yep. At the last D.C. meetup, a bunch of us HNers heard an environmental engineer express her fear of programming because she has always been "bad with language

Yep. At the last D.C. meetup, a bunch of us HNers heard an environmental engineer express her fear of programming because she has always been "bad with languages", and couldn't master Spanish or German. I really wish I called them "notations", instead I said they were "formalisms, just like in mathematics" .. and somehow I don't think she thought that conveyed neither simplicity nor ease of learning.