Question 9: Code readability [10]

Steve McConnell in Code Complete states "... programming is fundamentally hard ... programmers will have to wrestle with the messy real world; we will have to think rigorously about sequences, dependencies, and exceptions; and we'll have to deal with end users who can't make up their minds. We will always have to wrestle with ill-defined interfaces to other software and hardware, and we'll have to account for regulations, business rules, and other sources of complexity that arise from outside the world of computer programming.

In one of his blogs, Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software) expresses that one of the fundamental laws of programming is that It is harder to read code than to write it.

In light of McConnell's statements, how can Spolsky's claim be true? Provide arguments both in support of and in opposition to Spolsky's statement.