Natural languages are ambiguous, and that's a feature. Computer languages must be unambiguous.

I don't see a case for "complex" vs "simple" in the comparison with natural languages.

I fully accept that formalism is an important factor in programming language design. But all HLLs (well, even ASM) are a compromise between machine speak (https://youtu.be/CTjolEUj00g?si=79zMVRl0oMQo4Tby) and human speak. My case is that the current fashion is to draw the line at an overly simple level, and that there are ways to wrap the formalism in more natural constructs that trigger the parts of the brain that have evolved to hanle language (nouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions and so on).

Here's a very simple, lexical declaration made more human friendly by use of the preposition `my` (or `our` if it is packaged scoped)...

  my $x = 42;

Literate programming is not about programming in natural languages: it's about integrating code (i.e. the formal description in some DSL) with the meta-code such as comments, background information, specs, tests, etc.

BTW, one side benefit of LP is freedom from arbitrary structure of DSLs. A standard practice in LP is to declare and define objects in the spot in which they are being used; LP tools will parse them out and distribute to the syntactically correct places.

Exactly. I mean think about the programming languages used in aircraft and such. There's reasons. It all depends on what people are willing to tolerate.