[steego]

Whether some is readable is always going to be subject to who's reading it. That's simply how readable/non-readable work. Now you can learn to read new languages (human or machine), but I suspect someone who knows a romance language will find other romance languages for more readable than Chinese. Romance languages share words, alphabets, and many syntactic features. You can draw from an existing body of knowledge and patterns when learning a new romance language. There's a lot less to draw from if you're learning Chinese.

The same applies to programming languages. The fact is most programmers learn popular languages. Languages that deviate from popular languages tend to become less readable.

So the answer is no. If you are accustomed to a syntax, it naturally follows you are most likely going to languages that adopt those syntactic features will initially be more "readable" because things only become readable when you learn how to read them.

[macintux]

However, when you apply your "I know these programming languages and their syntax" bias to evaluating the readability of a teaching language, you're rather missing the point.

[skrishnamurthi]

Pyret draws from traditional algebra notation, Python, and OCaml/Haskell. If you do not know any of these, you must be a pretty weak programmer. If you do most of these, you ought to be able to recognize almost every part of it. Anyway, the good news is that programming beginners — who don't know any languages — have no real trouble with it, so any difficulties may say more about the reader's blind-spots than about the language itself.