This. I still remember the one and only time I tried doing a scripted app in HyperCard. I spent an entire day constantly fighting with the contextual definitions of keywords, literally playing a Clintonesque game of quibbling over the definition of 'is' and 'it'.

I completely agree. Natural Language style programming with AppleScript is incredibly difficult. I don't think hypertalk was that much better.

As a web developer and someone who programs in a superset of HyperCard (LiveCode) - I must say it was moderately difficult to grasp in the beginning. Strangely enough things that are required for your day job tend to have a way of getting learned. The hardest part for me was not the syntax, but the fact the IDE and the language are so inter-connected.

It's actually a fairly quick way of prototyping mobile apps for iOS/Android - which is one of the main things I use it for at work. Though, I am probably incredibly biased.

They recently(2012) open sourced the IDE, http://LiveCode.com

Actually I still found it easier than Lingo, I wrote a bunch of things while in art school in the 90s but when java applets took off I wound up abandoning hypercard for java.

Some people used to call HyperTalk “Visual COBOL”

Yes. You can write statements which are both valid HyperTalk and COBOL. This is not a good thing.

It went downhill from there:

Put field 2 of card 54 into field 5 of card 71

You could name fields, but it went visibly slower if you did.

There's visual programing, where you drag boxes around and connect them. This comes back every few years. Simple examples look great. Larger program are awful. Blender, the animation system, has a game development system like that. Programs are single huge, messy wiring diagrams. Programming requires lots of zooming and scrolling.

There's a reason that IC designers gave up schematics for VHDL.

If you want to see programming-as-carefully-formatted-English taken to the extreme, check out Inform 7, a system for writing interactive fiction. For example, here is the complete source of a game:

http://inform7.com/learn/eg/glass/source.txt

Anyone remember the cryptic document that _why posted in the form of a printer spool [1], years after his disappearance from programming? It was a sort of fictional, surrealist autobiography.

[1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/136875051/why-s-complete-printer-s...

I was grinning madly when I noticed -- in the part where he's exploring an island -- the page written in syntactically valid Inform 7.

Assuming:

    > Put field 2 of card 54 into field 5 of card 71

Means (Pascalish pseudocode):

    > Card71[5] := card54[2]

Or, perhaps a likely C adoption:

     > cards[71][5] = cards[54][2]

I'm not so sure I think your example demonstrate how "bad" this is.

Borland's ObjectVision had me jump into a rabbit hole for awhile, until I retreated back into (pre-Visual) FoxPro, as I kept running into limitations of the ObjectVision language.