Long time ago they tried to develop a system where the users could explain things in "plain" English instead of the difficult codes used so far. It was called cobol.
As has already been pointed out, 90% of time is spent on debugging and modifying existing code, not writing new stuff. And of the 10% of coding, 20% is writing the happy path, and 80% is spent in handling errors, corner cases, input validation, and inconsistent domain rules.
Maybe we can have AI tools to help with all this, but there is still a long way to go. And when we get there, it will still take professional developers to use those tools, and to understand all the special cases.
Taking something that's lower level than C and replacing characters with words is not exactly what one'd call a plain English interface, it's just being obnoxiously verbose.
There's a stark difference between trying to somehow half-assedly hardcode this into a language, and having a language that is designed for debugging only, fairly strict in handling corner cases, and then having a natural language interface on top of it so nobody actually has to write the cancer that it likely ends up being.
As has already been pointed out, 90% of time is spent on debugging and modifying existing code, not writing new stuff. And of the 10% of coding, 20% is writing the happy path, and 80% is spent in handling errors, corner cases, input validation, and inconsistent domain rules.
Maybe we can have AI tools to help with all this, but there is still a long way to go. And when we get there, it will still take professional developers to use those tools, and to understand all the special cases.