I mean, a quarter century ago Dijkstra argued your point compellingly, and he was right back then. If you read his "On the foolishness of “natural language programming”" (1978) you'll find that all of his most compelling arguments are gone now. Things have changed, and the machines can now largely cope with the ambiguity of language as well as the average human being can.
Since human language is the original source for the specifications we turn into formal code most of the time anyhow, we're really just asking if that original specification the programmers turn into formal symbolism is a form of code or not, and whether a good spec is equivalent to good code. I think it's difficult to argue that it's not, especially given that we now have these handy Natural Language to Formal Symbolism compilers.
> We just need to know that programming languages are used to express an executable computer programs (usually by translating to simple machine instructions) and that a natural language has never been used in this way in a significant manner.
I did that like 30 times today. Maybe it wasn't in the past, today it is. The path is now Specifications->LLM->Formal Symbolism->Machine Code, it used to be Specifications->Human->Formal Symbolism->Machine Code. The inputs and outputs are the same, and I would argue that the process is still "programming" regardless of syntactic games with semantics.
Eventually we'll find a more efficient version of that formal symbolism and stop using code designed to be human readable at all. Still nothing will really changed besides the input method.
