"Readable" languages are rather manager-centric. And because software managers become increasingly unimportant (or decreasingly important :), so will "readable" languages.
Of course programmers need readability too, but given a choice they'd rather stick to a concise and powerful language. Why? Probably because a powerful language, among other things, doesn't require you to get back to your code and fix it too often, and hence, you don't need that language to be too readable. It allows you to solve a problem in small, rock-solid and easily testable chunks.
I'm desperately looking for such a powerful "write-and-forget" programming language. Is it Lisp? I don't know yet.
Lisp is perfectly readable after you spend a few days to a week reading it. You just have to get used to the organization of code, and then you start to read code by indentation, rather than by paren-counting. Then everything is very smooth, and it's just as readable as Python.
Perl is known as write-and-forget, although Lisp does everything it does better, except for CPAN.
Sometimes I think I am the only one on the planet who hates CPAN. Chasing dependencies gets old really fast. I really really like the python packaging model -- many packages contain a single code file which you can just save to development directory. No installation, no munging around with paths.
On Lisp vs. Python: http://lemonodor.com/archives/001497.html
"Readable" languages are rather manager-centric. And because software managers become increasingly unimportant (or decreasingly important :), so will "readable" languages.
Of course programmers need readability too, but given a choice they'd rather stick to a concise and powerful language. Why? Probably because a powerful language, among other things, doesn't require you to get back to your code and fix it too often, and hence, you don't need that language to be too readable. It allows you to solve a problem in small, rock-solid and easily testable chunks.
I'm desperately looking for such a powerful "write-and-forget" programming language. Is it Lisp? I don't know yet.