Readability is subjective. There's no universal notion of "readability". Code that looks perfectly fine to one person, might looks like pure gobbledy-gook to the other. It's important to recognize that, whenever we're talking about "code readability".
Indeed, it's more common to write 'let the area be a, the width be w and the height h; then a = w * h' than it is to write 'area = with * height' when expositing in a maths textbook. This is a really hard habit for me to get out of, even when writing code.