What that means, though, is you can only determine if code is readable after it's written, and read by other people. And I agree with you. But that also means that, while you're writing code, or thinking about the code you're going to write, or trying to decide between two possibilities, 'readability' doesn't mean anything. So you can't use it to guide you towards more readable code; instead it can merely be used to decide which code should be replaced / refactored / rewritten. And you can't use it to teach new developers how to write better code.