The author spends a considerable portion of the piece attacking a straw man. As he mentions in the article, people who stress the importance of reading and writ

The author spends a considerable portion of the piece attacking a straw man. As he mentions in the article, people who stress the importance of reading and writing skills aren't merely advocating for the ability to transcribe speech to paper and pronounce written text; they are also advocating for the communication skills that are taught as part of a good literacy education. Similarly, people who stress the importance of programming are not merely advocating that people gain the ability to transcribe a perfectly detailed spec into executable code, they're also advocating for the modeling skills that give you the skills to write the spec. His real point is that he believes teaching people modeling and computing skills using Excel would be more useful than teaching them modeling and computing skills using python. Depending on the audience and the amount of time they have to dedicate to the topic, I might agree with him. Many undergrad business programs, for instance, require a course in Excel/VBA, which seems sensible. However, I think many people who say things like "computing is the new literacy" think that computing and modeling might be important enough skills that most people should dedicate more than the equivalent of 1 semester in college to them. They might instead suggest 3 semesters, or maybe even that high school students take a computing course every year. And if he wants to replace all THAT with Excel, I think I would argue that you've got enough time to add in some python too.