I have to assume GP is being sarcastic

Exactly.

My initial thought is highly specific human language is actually harder to write than most code, and always more verbose. Well written philosophy comes to mind.

I'd argue that this is part of the reason ORMs gained so much prominence. They solve the problem that SQL introduces by trying to emulate natural language. Most developers will gladly risk sacrificing some specificity of the query in exchange for reducing the verbosity of a SQL query. Obviously if the dev knows their ORM/SQL well, there is no lost precision.

tldr (or boring)? skip to the last pragraph.

"the product of pi and the square of r" is no less clear than the mathematical transcription of it.

3245 is perhaps English, but there's nothing wrong with "three thousand, two hundred and forty-five".

Some more examples taken from Wikipedia:

The sum of zero and zero. Five less than the product of eight and some value. Seven times the square of some value plus four times the aforesaid value minus ten.

I mean I could go on; these are either not ambiguous, or they're ambiguous only because of a lack of convention.

We don't do it because our attention span doesn't last long enough. We need to keep looking back at what we've already read to really understand what we're reading. Mathematical formulae give us the ability to do that quickly, since the graphical, multidimensional concise layout quickly allows us to find the place we're looking for.

Because nobody has been able to implement a computable implementation of English. It's an orthogonal issue to ambiguity.

I'm pretty sure controlled attempto English or lojban (zero ambiguity natural languages) have no computable implementations either.

I'm an NLP scientist trying to implement a software that take english as input and parse it into a queryable data structure that has zero semantic loss. I'm aware more than anybody on this thread, of the challenges of coreference resolution, word sense disambiguation, semantic parsing, etc... I didn't say that usual language is free of ambiguity. I just said humans are perfectly able to output clear, unambiguous English in a systematic manner. I just needs a little more mental energy.

> Half of the disagreements on HN result from misinterpretation of very specific, rather unambiguous statements.

Disagree, it's almost certainly more or less than half; it's incredibly unlikely that these statements would account for exactly half of disagreements. Furthermore the statements in question are rather specific and very unambiguous, not the other way around.