And yet the core idea is valid.
I've found incredible value from studying the humanities, especially literature. Some of the courses I took in college completely changed the way I view and understand the world. Literature has been a constant source of inspiration for me, and without doubt has made me a more whole, critical, and creative person--something that has had a marked effect on my career in startups (Caveat: It helps having grown up coding alongside this, I suppose).
With that said, I found the author's examples to be terribly reductive. Studying liberal arts is not going to make you better at finding memory leaks or optimizing algorithms. Exposure to the humanities will, however, make you a more well-rounded human being and help you to contextualize and understand big-picture problems (vision, positioning, identity...the WHY behind the product) from a different (and, of course, not always better!) perspective than might typically be found at a company filled exclusively with STEM graduates. I agree with the headline and the spirit of the article, but it's too bad the author's defense of it doesn't stack up.
No matter how dumbed-down the tone, for me behind it always lies a figured out person doing smt that is definitely cool from the start.
More than just selling to the lazy ones, it protects itself from being criticised by the competent ones. (You end your concern w an agreeing sentence: the point is valid). (It can do this because it's written by a cool guy sharing cool stuff).
What i take from a story like this is that it's not abt CS, not abt woolf. It's basically: "how to become a perfect painter? Become a perfect person, then paint naturally"
This is not true for Python.
This is also not true for C if you forward declare the functions!
This can be worked around by stuffing everything into a main method and putting if __name__ == '__main__': main() at the bottom of the file (which I usually do anyway). But the mere requirement that you must remember to do so, just as you must remember to forward-declare functions in C, is still an incentive to work from the bottom of the file upwards.