Whether "natural-language-like syntax" is enough "count as natural language programming" is probably a question of definition. For Dijkstra's essay here, he doesn't offer a particular definition, but he certainly seems to be implying something much more fluid and ambiguous than Inform7 is.

I definitely didn't mean to imply Inform7 had achieved the holy-grail of natural language programming or anything.

I think Dijkra's main point he's driving at is here:

> I suspect that machines to be programmed in our native tongues —be it Dutch, English, American, French, German, or Swahili— are as damned difficult to make as they would be to use.

I'm inferring/assuming a bunch, but I think he's saying something along the lines of, programming is useful because it is precise, and natural language is not precise, so attempts to make programming languages more like natural language are butting up into this inherent contradiction of precision. And therefore will end up as worse programming languages (for attempting to be more naturalistic).

In the history of programming languages, I think most attempts to be "more natural language like", such as COBOL or AppleScript, do become worse for attempting to walk the tightrope between natural-language and programming. I think Inform7 is unusual in that it achieves that balance in a way that isn't just objectively terrible (you may disagree) - I think that's mostly because it offers very few programming constructs, and is a tool for writing a kind of prose (text adventure games).

Anyway, to come back around, that was my reasoning for mentioning Inform7 - I think it's an interesting deviation from other experiments in natural language programming so far.