Well, there's the second issue of doing it such that the machine can produce results efficiently. Which tends rather towards the mathy computer-science side of things - which is where I think the less social "I just want to write code" people would be much happier.
Efficiency is implicit in most natual-language queries. Managing efficiency tradeoffs is a good example of something fuzzy yet important that you have to be able to figure out from natural-language queries and human interaction.
But yeah, if you really just want to work with numbers, you’ll probably be happier in CS academia.
