The article sounds to me, like Zed is saying Python's usefulness to him is mainly as an educational language, not so much a "daily" language. Is this right?
These days I'm going with C and Lua. For example, I'm starting this project:
For fun with Lua and wxWidgets, and my latest websites are all Mongrel2 and Lua based with:
But, for teaching total beginners to programming I'm finding Python is the best so far.
The context right before he said that was that platforms are the interesting things, not languages. He's a Python user at work so he's getting his daily dose, but mixes things up at home.
He then goes on to say some of the quoted stuff about punctuation/structure. I took it as programming languages in general aren't an interesting topic to him, but Python caught his eye and actually interested him for the educational value.
Zed can obviously speak to that better than I. I just pretend I know how to interview and write :)