You said it before I did; wasn't this the basic point of COBOL? TO make something that more naturally read like English but could be executed.

It's a cute idea, though I think the consensus is that once you actually learn a programming language, it generally doesn't help to have it look like prose.

I wouldn't be so sure of that consensus, given that C# and Python exist and are generally well-regarded by their users. Clearly there are varying degrees to it, and taking the idea to its logical extreme is not by necessity going to produce the best result, but there's certainly merit to the idea of code that can be read more naturally.

And I think that is really the point of syntax sugar: reading code, not writing code. It seems like a misconception about syntax sugar is that its primary purpose is to make code easier for beginners to learn to write. But I would contend that the real purpose is to make code easier for even experienced programmers to read at a glance, because reading code is actually far more important than writing it.

...granted a certain subsection of the population has determined that reading code is for chumps and boast about how quickly they can use a tool to write lines of code they haven't even read, and that this is the future of software development. Despite their boasts I have yet to see any software I would actually want to use that was written in this manner, though.