I don't know if it's true for Chomsky, but I have noticed that a lot of academic sentences use a lot of inner clauses. I think it's a bad habit. When reading those sentences as a programmer, I wish for a lot of parentheses so I can determine order of operations. Without them we're left to infer that order, which is extra work when we're also just trying to figure out what the sentence itself is about.

Here's an example from T.M. Scanlon's "What We Owe to Each Other", a philosophical book on morality I was reading yesterday:

"When I ask myself what reason the fact that an action would be wrong provides me with not to do it, my answer is that such an action would be one that I could not justify to others on grounds I could expect them to accept."

This sentence is actually key to what the entire book is about, but.... "what reason the fact that an action"? I mean even as programmers we are taught to break apart long boolean expressions.

It's kind of like garden path sentences but a more general syntactic ambiguity that smart people are more guilty of due to their need to explain complex subjects. Hard for a writer to recognize, because they know what they mean.