I can't speak for him, but it looks a lot like my pre-code scribbles. As someone who takes pride in being a fleshware translator of pseudo-code to real-code, I feel indignant at the sight of executable, Englishy specification.

High praise or a heavy put-down?

Also, I seem to hold the Guy Steele languages in highest regard, and consider the rest passable toys. C, Common Lisp, Scheme, Java, Fortran .. somehow they feel real. You crack open the spec and you're quickly welcomed into an intelligent dialog with the best minds in systems programming. I read several chapters of the Java spec last night and learned more about the language in one night than weeks of "googling" Ruby. The GSL-school of specification is precise, uses a well established vocabulary, and explains the syntactic and semantic rules of the language, along with their required execution environment. Not a word is said about add-on packages, installation crap, compiler internals or how to fork the language on github.

Compare these two and see what I mean:

http://docs.python.org/reference/index.html

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/third_edition/html/j3TOC....

See how much more detailed the Java specification is; although the language has more features, the spec manages to be much more succinct and precise. The Python spec is littered with references to "CPython" and the internals of an specific compiler.