> In some sense, all programming is boilerplate expansion because computers have (until now) been unable to be programmed with anything approaching natural language.

Maybe sometimes, but not always. When you need to actually render the thing you have all kinds of micro decisions, like where to put the square, what color, how fast it spins, etc.

You might not care about the details, but maybe you do. If it spins at 10000 rpm, will you care then?

Natural language, and human communication in general, is ambiguous, and coding is in great part about disambiguation.

Sure, you can use English to disambiguate as much as needed, but wouldn’t you then end up with some yaml-like spec that wasn’t much easier to create in the first place?