Yeah exactly. It's not that there's no improvement to be had, it's that you're not going to get far if you assume the current system is there to make things harder.
I think part of it is, despite widespread acceptance of puns, most people seem to think English (or any other widely spoken language) is a lot less ambiguous than it really is.
There's a reason legal documents are the way they are as well. Granted in that field there is sometimes incentive to obfuscate your meaning, but I still don't think that's the reason for most of the difficulty in outsiders easily reading and writing legalese.
The fact of the matter is, expressing logic (or music) in words is hard. The more detailed you need to be, the harder it gets. That's why the example of making a sandwich comes up so often in introductions to programming[0]. If people can't express in their native language how to do something they do every day, in an unambiguous enough manner for a "computer" to perform the action, that speaks to a deeper problem than the representation being too hard.
[0]: It's not a great example, because the instructor usually is going to maliciously try to find any logic hole they can, making it feel more like a hazing ritual than a lesson to be learned. But it does come up a lot for a reason.
I think part of it is, despite widespread acceptance of puns, most people seem to think English (or any other widely spoken language) is a lot less ambiguous than it really is.
There's a reason legal documents are the way they are as well. Granted in that field there is sometimes incentive to obfuscate your meaning, but I still don't think that's the reason for most of the difficulty in outsiders easily reading and writing legalese.
The fact of the matter is, expressing logic (or music) in words is hard. The more detailed you need to be, the harder it gets. That's why the example of making a sandwich comes up so often in introductions to programming[0]. If people can't express in their native language how to do something they do every day, in an unambiguous enough manner for a "computer" to perform the action, that speaks to a deeper problem than the representation being too hard.
[0]: It's not a great example, because the instructor usually is going to maliciously try to find any logic hole they can, making it feel more like a hazing ritual than a lesson to be learned. But it does come up a lot for a reason.