Readability is entirely and extremely subjective. I don't find Japanese readable, but that's because I never bothered to put the time in to learn it. I find TeX and LaTeX readable, though. Readability becomes slightly more objective, but not much more so, when you have a well defined and sufficiently homogenous target audience.

If you make a new language today, you should figure out who it's for (probably yourself and a couple of other people), and design it accordingly. As was always the case.

> If you would make a new language today you would design for readability above all else.

So, basically, COBOL?