> Code is much much harder to check for errors than an email.

Disagree.

Even though performing checks on dynamic PLs is much harder than on static ones, PLs are designed to be non-ambiguous. There should be exactly 1 interpretation for any syntactically valid expression. Your example will unambiguously resolve to an error in a standard-conforming Python interpreter.

On the other hand, natural languages are not restricted by ambiguity. That's why something like Poe's law exists. There's simply no way to resolve the ambiguity by just staring at the words themselves, you need additional information to know the author's intent.

In other words, an "English interpreter" cannot exist. Remove the ambiguities, you get "interpreter" and you'll end up with non-ambiguous, Python-COBOL-like languages.

With that said, I agree with your point that blindly accepting 20kloc is certainly not a good idea.