> Because your co-workers, or co-contributors may have a different definition of what readable is.

The same could be said about comments. You can always say they are not enough. As I said - comments have their use - in my opinion for the cases where language is not flexible enough to express intent in a readable way.

Or you're implementing an odd algorithm where a pointer to the paper, etc, describing it is located so that co-workers, etc, know what's going on. Or you're working around architectural limitations, such as doing work on microcontrollers, where you don't always have your preferred integer size to work with. Or working around bugs and/or poor naming conventions in other peoples' software. Yes, your code may be beautiful and cause angels to sing, but it's going to be working with code belched from the deep bowels of hell, and giving others clues as to why you're doing things in non-intuitive manners is not just useful, but needed.

I agree, though in my experience all the cases you enumerated are not norm but exceptions to it.

I think the point is that in writing something like systemd it's more likely to be the norm than if you were, say, writing a Ruby server.

Point taken.