You're a bit off, because this is C and I know how to write it. I can read and write English pretty well, too, but I have come across literature that is unreadable in that language as well.
""" riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth, Castle and Environs.
Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war; nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County's giorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time.... """
The difference is that I don't think anyone makes the claim that Finnegan's Wake is readable or easy to work with. Everyone's pretty much agreed that this is a very unusual style that takes an enormous amount of time and effort to appreciate and understand. The style is fine, if it's someone's "thing" then great, more power to them. But what gets me is people pointing to this style of coding and feigning ignorance or surprise that others could find it troublesome and making a big point of saying "Well it's easy for me, I guess you're just not smart" when confronted about it
Hey listen, I understand that other people find it troublesome.
The thing is that I think it's something people can learn if they want, and I think there are benefits to doing so.
I only object to the label "it's unreadable" because it demands the author (or someone else) make it "readable" to cure, when the right fix is to fix the programmer: to give them the experiences needed to be able to read it.
That's admittedly not very easy for the novice reader- certainly it would be much better for them to write less dense and use a smaller vocabulary, and that's why, just with English, we start novice readers with less dense study materials that utilise a smaller vocabulary.
However it's a mistake to think that just because business English is a bit more dense than Goodnight Moon, that it's unreadable, and it's a worse one to think its lack of accessibility is without some value to the writer.
I should think people should want to seek out that value in exactly the same way.
Though I disagree with the claim of unreadability, for the reason you've mentioned—readability is a matter of conventions, never an absolute—I don't think it really 'demands' anything. If I were to call this a non-standard C coding style, then I don't think you or anyone would disagree; but that is just a statement of fact, not a demand to standardise it. I think a claim of unreadability can be read charitably in the same way, as a statement of the fact that "people used only to the standard C programming style will find this difficult to read", not any demand or even request that it be otherwise.
If saagarjha means here be dragons they should say so: Fewer people would misunderstand them!
But I think you and I both know this is not what they meant.
Heylisten,Iunderstandthatotherpeoplefindittroublesome.Thethin
gisthatIthinkit'ssomethingpeoplecanlearniftheywant,andIthinkt
herearebenefitstodoingso.Ionlyobjecttothelabel"it'sunreadable
"becauseitdemandstheauthor(orsomeoneelse)makeit"readable"tocu
re,whentherightfixistofixtheprogrammer:togivethemtheexperienc
esneededtobeabletoreadit.That'sadmittedlynotveryeasyforthenov
icereadercertainlyitwouldbemuchbetterforthemtowritelessdensea
nduseasmallervocabulary,andthat'swhy,justwithEnglish,westartn
ovicereaderswithlessdensestudymaterialsthatutiliseasmallervoc
abulary.Howeverit'samistaketothinkthatjustbecausebusinessEngl
ishisabitmoredensethanGoodnightMoon,thatit'sunreadable,andit'
saworseonetothinkitslackofaccessibilityiswithoutsomevaluetoth
ewriter.Ishouldthinkpeopleshouldwanttoseekoutthatvalueinexact
lythesameway.Arthur Whitney once wrote: One day I asked him, "Roger, do you do math in English or Cantonese?" He smiled at me and said, "I do it in Cantonese because it's faster and it's completely regular."
In this comment you make the opposite point: that one should write in a style readers will most easily understand as they currently are.
You may think, because one example is of code and the other of prose, that those points are not in conflict--but they are.
All are proper English, as any linguist will tell you, but Scots English is more or less mutually unintelligible.
AAVE is relatively understandable because of pop-culture, but without previous exposure to it, someone who didn't have any influence to it would be confused in an environment that heavily uses it.
And if you got sat in front of a Cajun family, despite the relative amount in common with them, linguistically, you'd be bewildered at some of their heavily French-influenced vocabulary and structure.