Do you believe that code is inherently hard to read?

Is English hard to read?
Code is just an abstract form of poetry.

Inherently, no

When you strip it down to its fundamentals, any given programming language is just comprised of a grammar, like any natural language

In fact, by their very nature, they are far more easy to understand than natural languages, due to their formal structure and lack of irregular patterns (e.g. Irregular verbs in Latin-based languages)

I think the reason that some people find them difficult to understand is purely because they are used to using natural languages. If you were to teach an infant a programming language as it's primary form of communication (instead of a natural language), then I imagine they would be just as competent with it as they would have been with a natural language

No, unless it's poorly written.