[jowiar]

The benefit is limiting the cognitive overhead of a language. The translation you describe is a task that must be done every single time by every single person who works with the code. Especially when discussing the code with another person, you end up reading things out loud. Every single time I encounter a bit of ascii-art code, I have to rack my brain for "in this context, what is the word that this symbol translates to". It gets especially bad if you work in multiple languages.

Also, I despise the logic of "because it exists on a keyboard, it should be used". C is a terrible offender in this regard, with * and & used for no good reason.

10-years-old, or 6th grade, or whatever is an arbitrary number, but don't get caught up in the distinction. "90% of high school graduates" would institute a similar threshold, and probably be less controversial.