This was attempted using COBOL with a varying degree of success depending on who you ask. I myself have not used it but it seems to me the verbosity would be a

This was attempted using COBOL with a varying degree of success depending on who you ask. I myself have not used it but it seems to me the verbosity would be a major drawback for most tasks. Perhaps one can learn to read it quickly but I believe having shorter yet self documenting names for variables, functions, objects, etc leads to being able to store more in our limited human working memory, which is vital for more complex operations. Code structured more like natural language takes longer to compile, and takes up more disk space. Perhaps these are not such drastic drawbacks for the use cases it was developed.