I feel like, whether with human or computer languages, you can only really say what the experience of reading a language is like once you're fluent in it; and you can only compare the experience of reading a language to another if you're fluent in both of them.
Like, to me, the human language of Vietnamese looks like a mess of accents, and I'm baffled by why they're necessary. But I'm not a fluent speaker of Vietnamese; and I can imagine that, for someone who is fluent in Vietnamese, and another sibling language like Chinese, maybe the extra accents actually compare very well and help readability compared to e.g. the reduced set of accents in Chinese pinyin.
Likewise, I would suspect that for someone fluent in both C++ and Rust (i.e. someone who knows how to write code that takes advantage of arcane language features in both), Rust might be more readable than C++ because of some of the initially-offputting syntax, whereas C++ might seem less readable because it eschews extra syntax in favor of using template constructors for everything.
This reminds me of my experience with TypeScript. I kept noticing it and feeling a little irritated by its popularity. God it added so much noise to the code. JavaScript was fine for years. I got stuff done. I caught the bugs and debugged them.
Once I finally took the plunge and committed a full project to learning TypeScript, I grokked it. I no-longer saw noise, I saw signal. I saw details about interfaces that I used to have to infer, document, or reverse engineer if I forgot.
I had (still have!) trouble reading JS, because the vast majority of things I've worked on have been in statically typed languages. JS was baffling because I always have to try to infer/reverse engineer things that I can just read off in the languages I'm most familiar with.
The only way I really could handle dynamic stuff was for things like scripts, where I could mostly remember the entire set of types.
I've gotten better with JS after using some TS, but that difficulty still exists. Correspondingly, I'm delighted by Rust - sure, it's a verbose language, but that puts everything I want to know right there for me to read.
This reminds me of a quip relating to evaluating the morality of historical figures (e.g. whether they were basically good or basically bad) - you're a tourist. You're evaluating someone in an entirely different culture.
So like you said - same thing with languages. You could probably substitute "Japanese text" or "Arabic text" into the original comment and see a little more clearly that fluency does matter.
Those that are fluent in a programming language have merely become accustomed to the unpleasantness and it makes sense for them. There are people which genuinely think that complex mathematical notation can be beautiful, but that opinion's not shared by most humans.
In other words, there's beauty, and there's acquired taste and it's legitimate to point out this difference.
> There are people which genuinely think that complex mathematical notation can be beautiful, but that opinion's not shared by most humans.
Most humans frankly don't understand what's needed to capture complex mathematical concepts, so that's not at all surprising. The same argument can be applied to your objection to syntax, and this merely reiterates the OP's point: until you're fluent in a particular language, you have no idea whether the syntax is necessitated by some complex but necessary semantics that you simply don't know about.
Like, to me, the human language of Vietnamese looks like a mess of accents, and I'm baffled by why they're necessary. But I'm not a fluent speaker of Vietnamese; and I can imagine that, for someone who is fluent in Vietnamese, and another sibling language like Chinese, maybe the extra accents actually compare very well and help readability compared to e.g. the reduced set of accents in Chinese pinyin.
Likewise, I would suspect that for someone fluent in both C++ and Rust (i.e. someone who knows how to write code that takes advantage of arcane language features in both), Rust might be more readable than C++ because of some of the initially-offputting syntax, whereas C++ might seem less readable because it eschews extra syntax in favor of using template constructors for everything.