Yes, it was a bit longer than necessary to make his point. I think the general point is that programming is more about information and system architecture and less about the details of one particular language. I tend to agree with this view.

I agree that RDF and the semantic web folks are also working on related concepts (as are the PBEL / web-services folks). The programming landscape seems to be changing faster and faster, so I do think that we will end up with several good meta-programming environments in the near future.