In many ways, yes, but it is often more efficient then people give credit. People in general do try to use fewer words when possible, and to understand the meaning of a sentence, you have to not just consider what was said, but what was not said.
An example is the sentence 'Yesterday, I tried to fix my bike'. Did the speaker manage to fix their bike? A naive parsing of the sentence would say it's unclear. However, if you heard a friend tell you this, you'd probably assume that they didn't fix their bike. Why? Because, if they had fixed it, surely they would have said 'Yesterday, I fixed my bike' instead: it's shorter and simpler.
Natural language may be inefficient for information transmission (a la information theory) but it can be more efficient for (human) understanding transmission, and humans are who(m?) it is meant for :)
When I first gave a serious look at literate programming, I felt that what Knuth & co. could (should) have done to best demonstrate it is to write a program to describe/output the PKZIP file format. The CWEB sources themselves might be good and all, but most examples of literate programming I've looked at, including (and especially) the infamous article opposite McIlroy, don't really do anything for me. I checked around, thinking that surely someone realized this and that it must exist, but I didn't turn up anything. It's the same today, as far as I know. (I did find a DEFLATE implementation in JS run through one of those documentation tools that purports to produce a literate program, but it's not a literate program in the sense that Knuth uses the term.)
Years back, there was a very good book called something like The Data Compression Book by, IIRC, a Mark Nelson. Explained many compression schemes including *zip, with working code in C. I had it, read it early in my career, could understand parts of it. A testimonial to the book, not me.
In many ways, yes, but it is often more efficient then people give credit. People in general do try to use fewer words when possible, and to understand the meaning of a sentence, you have to not just consider what was said, but what was not said.
An example is the sentence 'Yesterday, I tried to fix my bike'. Did the speaker manage to fix their bike? A naive parsing of the sentence would say it's unclear. However, if you heard a friend tell you this, you'd probably assume that they didn't fix their bike. Why? Because, if they had fixed it, surely they would have said 'Yesterday, I fixed my bike' instead: it's shorter and simpler.