You would be surprised how much you can get away with by learning to work with the machine directly. The way that the human mind works without training is naturally ambiguous and chaotic. There are of course benefits to offloading some of the thinking and parsing to the compiler or interpreter whatever; that's why we have Python, because C and Assembly weren't enough.
But human beings have been inventing formal notations because they end up being the right tool for the job, most of the time, to guide thought, even if the upstart cost of using them takes some work. I suspect that being afraid of formality will gradually make you lose power over the computer, and will cause unpredictable results when it isn't crystal clear where the impedance to communication and understanding with the machine lies.
I'm all for the more declarative style of programming though, even if it doesn't resemble any particular natural language specifically (remember that papers like these still have a grand Anglo bias in their implementations – imagine the sparsity of a Chinese version of these studies, and the potential difference of the results!).
But human beings have been inventing formal notations because they end up being the right tool for the job, most of the time, to guide thought, even if the upstart cost of using them takes some work. I suspect that being afraid of formality will gradually make you lose power over the computer, and will cause unpredictable results when it isn't crystal clear where the impedance to communication and understanding with the machine lies.
I'm all for the more declarative style of programming though, even if it doesn't resemble any particular natural language specifically (remember that papers like these still have a grand Anglo bias in their implementations – imagine the sparsity of a Chinese version of these studies, and the potential difference of the results!).