well I will not go for the fools, but she's right. Code that should be maintained should be understandable for a normal person within the problem domain it gets explained to.
But it's one of the basic rules @ highlevel languages. You should write as declarative as possible.
in 97 things a programmer should know. Chapter 58: by Linda Rising
Maybe it’s because most of them are smart people, but in all the years I’ve taught and worked side by side with programmers, it seems that most of them thought that since the problems they were struggling with were difficult, the solutions should be just as difficult for everyone (maybe even for themselves a few months after the code was written) to understand and maintain.
It's maintainability 1 on 1 in the end.