The article doesn't seem to address the question in the title. Why would they be mutually exclusive?
Since it summarizes a talk, we changed the URL to that of the talk, in keeping with the HN guidelines' request for original sources (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
Anyone can skim the blog and get the gist of a 75 minute talk-a-thon in seconds, and move right along.
The presentation is just beating a dead horse about text expressions edited ina text editor and/or executed at the command line, and interpretted by R, vs. button clicking in R, in a nice IDE that's comfortable and approachable for non-programmers.
E.G. le tooling debate du jour, oui oui, monsieur...
In the Q&A at the end, the very last question asked (regarding visual pipeline GUI's or something like that) was the content probably most directly related to the title.
What I think is interesting is that even though he's largely correct, in the real world the ease of use of approachable UI's, even if built on top of objectively substandard application cores, very often wins the race, at least until the next "shift" occurs. This has saved Microsoft's bacon more than once in history.