It was sold as "basically English, so programmers are obsolete since everyone can write their own software". Which is pretty much the same pipe dream as "no code".

Yeah, if you look at it, it's designed after recipes, even more so than typical programming. It starts with a title of the module, then a data definition section (ingredients), and the the program section which is a numbered list of english phrases to be performed more or less in order.

The idea was to convert women who had been working _as_ computers, into programmers.

"Programmers" referring to engineers working with machine code and hardware architecture. People writing in high level languages where not considered "real programmers" back in the day, just like people writing in Python or JavaScript were not considered "real programmers" more recently.

But who you decide to call "real programmers" is of course beside the point. What is interesting is the raising of the abstraction level which happens with higher-level tools.

By the standards of the time when even macro assemblers weren't always available and programmers often had to do the translation to machine code manually, it was unlike code. It was even portable!

Have you met assembly?