BPEL is not programming

In the brilliant MIT lectures (and book) Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, they talk about how to rate the worth of programming languages.

The two criteria are abstraction and combination.

• Simply put, a good/powerful/useful language will allow you to use abstraction to simplify complex processing; ie hiding the details, while making the processing more general.
• A good language will allow you to combine the language components in meaningful ways, that represent the relationship of those components. Good combination allows you to combine the user defined abstractions in the same ways as the built in language components. 
• When abstraction and combination feed off each other, when you can abstract on the combination and combine abstractions; this is when you have a great language.

As this SOA guru says, BPEL isn't really programming.

The only kind of abstraction at all, is making a whole new service. Using the JDeveloper BPEL view, you can hide the details of the verbose xml source code; But then all you see is an overly simplified 'pictures of boxes' representations. For example an "assignment" block, with an optional user defined name. Simplified, yes; but not actually abstracted.
The lack of abstraction affects what little combination options there are.
BPEL gives you variables with XML types tied to your schema, other services which you can call, variable assignments, java code blobs, xsl transform, some simple exception handling, scoped blocks, and very simplistic control structures (if/else and loop), as well as a parallel block.

That may seem like a reasonable set of built in features, in particular the parallel block, but without subroutines or functions of any sort, without structures or objects; the kinds of combination are simplistic rather than simplified.
Each basic component can only be combined in prescribed ways with certain other built in components. This means that for example, the only data type is XML variable, so all of the transforms and assignments only operate on that one thing.
With no way to define new data types or functions, the kinds of combination are limited to the built in components, and the hard coded ways that they interact.

This language simplification doesn't even achieve the elusive idea of a "business person" being able to program in it. The overly simplistic nature of the language means that even programmers have a hard time with it.

A better way to attempt the non-programmer doing programming would be to develop an internal DSL, for the actual business domain. BPEL is not even close to something that high level. And it's not capable of building such a thing.

I don't think it actually deserves to be called a programming language.

It really does deserve the name BHell.