What if you hire developers to maintain the code? Doesn't the more readable syntax affect the developers' performance?
(Honest question, not trying to start a programming language flame war.)
(Honest question, not trying to start a programming language flame war.)
In Python for example, there's kind of a (mostly) default way of doing it. In other languages, not so much. But that doesn't mean the company culture can't push for something like this (a standard, at least to the extent in which a language permits doing so). Developers performance is more base on how they like working in a language (better to find true language agnostic developers), culture fit, personality, etc...
If you're outsourcing, that's a totally different set of traits and number of things to look for than if you're hiring in house (which I would recommend for the core team and in general anyway; hiring in house that is).
What does "readable" mean? If "readable" means "I don't like sigils" or "operator overloading confuses me" or "everyone should indent their code the same way", I suspect you won't get any interesting answers.
Have the developers any experience in this language? Have they significant experience in this language? Have they any experience with the other developers? Have they significant experience in the problem domain?