I did an experiment with some co-workers around a decade ago, and one of the results was most of that group learning for the first time it was possible to train yourself to read code more easily. I was self-taught and had been doing it for so long, combined with some very specific pressures as a teacher's assistant for years, that I learned to read code in programming languages I understand about as easily as I can read English - something they had never even considered possible before.

I never did find out how they see code, but I have to imagine the right verb for them was "deciphering" instead of "reading"...