thoughts, programming
idea: instead of trying to judge the impossibly elusive code-quality property of "readability", instead judge the alternatively elusive property of "justifiability". good code should minimize the depth of explanation needed to justify that the code does the right thing.
lots of code that is "readable" has this property. for instance if the code reads like a near-english specification, then the justification is done because nothing satisfies a spec better than a spec.
hopefully this would avoid some of unhelpful advice that "readability" promotes by incorrectly relating code to prose. optimizing "readability" tries to turn the code into a book, because nothing is more readable than a book!