I am of opinion, code should be written to be readable. Rest of the desirable properties are just side-effects.
That's almost entirely coincidental with being easy to read. But even easiness to read is a side effect.
I worked in Perl. Yes it has a reputation for being hard to read, but that was not the problem. Our scripting was pretty basic and easy to read. It's the loose typing, the runtime evals, the lack of strict function parameters, no real IDE, “Only perl can parse Perl” - the fact you can load a module from a network share at runtime, import it, and call a function, based on a certain run flag - and so on. Refactoring was always a mine field and there was a lot I wanted to do in my old job but could not justify it due to the risk.
Side effects are usually unrelated or unwanted.