This is true. The downside is that a couple days of not worrying about the understandability of your code can lead to a spiral that quickly gets out of control.

This is true. The downside is that a couple days of not worrying about the understandability of your code can lead to a spiral that quickly gets out of control. Plus it makes expanding a dev team significantly harder since you really need people all on the same page of what readability means. Yes you can do things like coding standards, but the more free form the language the tougher such standards are. That doesn't make a language bad, but it does change when and who can get away with using it. Same as the argument that comes up every time people talk about Lisp.