> getting those out of your head into English is more important over the long haul than your undocumented short-term solution to the criteria.

I think there may be miscommunication going on, or I may be misreading the conversation. What I do not know is what valicord means by "satisfies the unwritten acceptance criteria".

In one interpretation, I think they make a ton of sense. We invented formal languages to solve precisely this problem. The precision and pedantic nature of formal languages (like math and code[0]) is to solve ambiguity. If this is the meaning, then yes, code is far more concise and clear[1] than a natural language. That's why we invented formal languages after all. So they may be having trouble converting it to English because they are unsatisfied with the (lack of) precision and verbosity. That when they are more concise that people are interpreting it incorrectly, which is only natural. Natural languages' advantage is their flexibility, but that's their greatest disadvantage too. Everything is overloaded.

But on the other hand, if they are saying that they are unable to communicate the basics (it seems you have read in this way) then I agree with you. Being able to communicate your work is extremely important. I am unsure if it is more important than ever, but it is certainly a critical skill. But then we still have the ambiguous question of "to who?" The type of writing one does significantly differs depending on the audience.

Only valicord can tell us[edit], but I think we're just experiencing the ambiguity that makes natural languages so great and so terrible. I think maybe more important than getting the words out of ones head is to recognize the ambiguity in our language. As programmers this should be apparent, as we often communicate in extremely precise languages. But why I'd say it is more important than ever is because the audience is more diverse than ever. I'd wager a large number of arguments on the internet occur simply due to how we interpret one another's words. The obvious interpretation for one is different for another.

[0] Obviously there's a spectrum with code. C is certainly more formal than Python and thus less ambiguous.

[1] Clear != easy to understand. Or at least not easy to understand by everyone. This is a skill that needs training.

[edit] Reading their response, I think it is the first interpretation.