What English is good at is expressing a huge variety of ideas. I once heard someone argue on NPR (sorry, no citation) that English is perhaps the /best/ language at expressing absolutely any idea to another person precisely because it has such a huge vocabulary and so many idiomatic phrases.

I've sometimes heard of programming as an art, like poetry, but if so I'd prefer to maintain that it is a minimalist art that enjoys pragmatism and flourishes when reduced.

Put another way - I don't want to write 'A Tale of Two Cities' in PHP, I want to write a website in PHP. Or more correctly, I don't want to write a website in PHP.