The original text was from 1978 according to other sources

Apple didn't learn those lessons with Apple Script either: there is a rigid sequence of characters that represents a valid program and if you're off by one character, tough. If you're lucky, the tool will guide you to what it wants. If not, you're stuck looking up the exact syntax so off to the reference manual you go, either way.

So there's minimal to looking up the syntax, whether it's based on some natural language phrase or a less wordy or ambiguous artificial language.

"friendly" or "natural" really is not a thing.