The article is talking about Perl anyway, which is notorious for its seemingly random syntax, so I don't think its really a good example for how intelligible an

The article is talking about Perl anyway, which is notorious for its seemingly random syntax, so I don't think its really a good example for how intelligible and random programming language syntax is. When you're a beginner, the languages syntax really does matter and thats one reason why, eg, Python is a better beginner language than Perl. Perl is often jokingly referred to as "line noise" while Python is often referred to as "executable pseudocode". Having said that, I completely agree with what you say. When spending a lot of time writing code, you really don't care about how intuitive the language is for beginners - much more important is that you can accurately and quickly express your programs. The closer to english a language gets, the more verbose the language gets and if I spend a lot of time programming, I want the language to be succint and straight to the point. (Nevermind that English contains a lot of ambiguous constructs, so an "english" programming language would still be horribly artificial for beginners anyway)