Programming has much more in common with literature than what engineers typically realize. (Not to mention its relation with philosophy, with classes being a pure Aristotelian system of universals).

Even for programs that are meant to be written and compiled once and never maintained, the programmer needs to build in their mind the whole story of the required computation, and put it in words for the compiler to transform it to low-level instructions. The clearer the programming language, the easier will be to reason about that story.