Agreed. The author’s reasoning behind his option may on the surface seem sound, but in reality it’s smoke and mirrors. Asking ANY developer what language someone else should work in is like asking them what automobile is the best to be chosen. The answer that will be given will be based on experience and comfort levels.
A mentor is crucial to developing the RIGHT approaches and methodologies. How to approach a problem, the pitfalls to avoid, etc. I have always said that a number of our problems with the current state of web development came because people decided that it was cheaper and easier just to add more hardware to a problem rather than learning to develop properly. Memory management, efficient code structure are two areas which “seasoned” developers, especially those that started outside of the web realm, are hands down better at. Database structures are another area which the tools available today can almost cause more problems than they can correct.
There are things that can be learned from us dinosaurs that used to have to learn to work within the boundaries of the machines we worked on. Battery life on mobile devices would be astonishing if the developers of today’s mobile operating systems took some of the concepts that us old mainframers employed.