> Obviously what's "readable" is not constrained to what some people find readable, but to what most people do.

That's hardly obvious to me at all. Leaving outside language syntax debates, the important readability concerns of code I deal with tend to include:

* the business domain

* the ecosystem of existing code in the organization

* the experience level of other developers

* coding standards and guidelines

* deployment and maintenance concerns

* the organizing concepts, architecture, and metaphors of the code in the small and large

* the context of where the code lives -- is it a one-off, is it structural code to get from one design to another, is it long-term code that has to meet certain criteria to be maintained for years

A random piece of code waved in front of a random person tells me nothing of interest with regard to those criteria.