At http://99-bottles-of-beer.net/, an old drinking song that printed out by an award-winning piece of code obfuscation cited in a Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obfuscated_code, inspired a comparison of programs written in various languages to print this song. The Cobol (and to a lesser extent C#) programs were easy to understand whereas other languages such as J*** were not. There was even a highly obfuscated one in JavaScript!
At http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alfredth/archive/2011/09/02/readability-in-programming-languages.aspx there is a very useful article on readability of langiages. Have a look at the 99 bottles of bear site and see how easy (or otherwise) various languages are to read.