Wha?

I'd like to take a quote from Matt Hackett completely out of context

which method is more readable is typically subjective, making that irrelevant

and wonder about it for a bit.

In the context I ripped that from, Matt was comparing "if" and "switch" (within the bigger context of JavaScript) and he went on to explicate the balances between efficiency and readability (and to quote his colleague Douglas Crockford, which I'll reproduce here because it's a good quote with too few gits

In chosing how to structure a program, the first priority has to be clarity of expression. From clarity comes correctness and maintainability. Subordinating clarity to save milliseconds should be discouraged. That is the wrong motivation).

Steve said

it is usually nearly impossible to [improve software] because it's so hard to understand what the authors meant when they wrote it. ... it also tends to be illegible simply because most programmers either have no idea how to write legible maintainable code, or if they do know how, they just don't bother. Or both.

Mark said

Squeek is a weird, buggy, undocumented mess and for the life of me, I can't figure out how to make a real application in it. But I keep firing it up just to let it blow my mind. Even though I have no idea how to create a freakin' dialog box in it, I can tell that this is how we should be writing software.