Even before 1997, it was individuals rather than IT departments who first demonstrated business uses for PCs.

I'm not taking a position on either side of this debate, just pointing to the trend....

Of interest is his third paragraph, the one that starts "in _every_ field ..." and it really makes me wonder if he had ever actually dealt with enterprise software at all.

The ironic thing is that in 1997 there were many more, what they consider, "professional" programmers. Today most programmers are targeting the web, and therefore wouldn't gain anything from ultra minimalism.

Frankly arguing for a enviroment so minimalist that it wouldn't contain a web browser is a non-starter for almost all professional programming jobs in 2016. And even for the few non-web development jobs that still exist (e.g. game development), you're still dependant on platform libraries in MacOS/Windows/Linux (e.g. OpenGL).

Ultimately people can continue this course, but the world has already decided their argument is wrong since this environment doesn't actually exist and it has been almost twenty years. I personally don't know a single development job that would work in such a cut down environment.