I spend way more time debugging code than writing it. I suspect most coders do. Programming has taught me that I am far from perfect.
Give me a language where I can jump right to the problem and my debugger will tell me how I goofed up, and I can look at it as a potential language I will use. Give me something where you double my debug time (which will add probably 30% to my total programming time) and I will ignore it. It doesn't matter how pretty and short it makes the code. Give me error line numbers or go home.
If you make my debugging more of a chore than it already is, you ain't no friend of mine.
I also agree with the author on the need for symbols rather than words in languages. It may make people feel all warm and fuzzy to write what looks like english, but && trumps and every day. {} or () wrapping something gives me a lot of info about what is going on and with little mental parsing.
In the end, CS just doesn't deliver a advantage to me that is worth moving away from something as easy to code in as JS, warts and all. And I have tried very hard to want to like it.