Sure, both extremes are shortsighted. I wasn't arguing for that, to be clear. I'm just saying clarity and ivory tower architecturing has little value if your system can't actually support the intended use case.

Which is what the person I was replying to said with "Code is for communicating with humans primarily, even though it needs to be run on a machine.". If the primary purpose is communication with other humans we wouldn't choose such awkward languages. The primary purpose of code is to run and provide some kind of features supporting use cases. It's really nice however if humans can understand it well.