It's a shame he doesn't mention Ada, which is static but oh so nice about it.

Right, but the problem is – as Peter Harkins mentions here – that programmers have this tendency to, once they master something hard (often pointlessly hard), rather than then making it easy they feel proud of themselves for having done it and just perpetuate the hard nonsense.

Yes, see the entire history of UNIX. I convinced someone programming was a bad choice for his major because of this stupid attitude.

I'm still reading, but I like how he takes issue with what currently passes for machine text. Some of my work covers the same problem. I should send him an e-mail.