It is intuitive to think of code as being hard to understand. We need to write comments and stick to stylistic conventions to make code readable, and are constantly inventing new languages that are supposedly easier to read than existing ones. We need to write our programs in modular ways, so that our puny brains can abstract away the details and understand the parts one by one. But is the alternative better? Is code hard to understand, or is it enabling us to handle (if barely so) an amount of complexity that we'd have no way to tackle without it?
This got me thinking about pseudocode. Pseudocode is written strictly for humans to read, and I think I can claim that its invention was enabled by the existence of proper programming languages. Is pseudocode not easier to understand than plain English prose? My experience trying to wrap my head around programming 101 algorithms by reading their Wikipedia articles says yes, very much so. A language for expressing and communicating how to do things - is this not what Sussman is talking about?