Easier, yes. Cheaper, no - with LP learning a new codebase takes much less time than usual.

As someone else noted programmers tend to be less than proficient writers (to say the least). That's unfortunate. Someone else mentioned that he sees value in LP in the context of education. That's because LP does make understanding the code both easier and faster. If it's good in education, why would it be bad in "normal" programming?

Instead of declaring LP as "too hard for normal people to use" we should try to teach people to be better writers. It's not necessarily one or the other, you can easily learn how to write prose (LP texts) along learning how to write code.

The only real problem with LP (besides lack of relevant skills in programmers) is ensuring that comments and code are in sync. But, how is it worse than the situation with documentation we have now? If anything LP makes it easier to keep docs and code in sync: they are in a single place and you can alter both simultaneously.

Of course, LP is a fuzzy concept. For example I call a certain style of writing comments LP, while others say that you need to have a tool like CWEB and the like to do LP. What's important is the push towards making the code more understandable by humans. There are different techniques to this end and LP is one of the more powerful among them.