Anyone can skim the blog and get the gist of a 75 minute talk-a-thon in seconds, and move right along.
The presentation is just beating a dead horse about text expressions edited ina text editor and/or executed at the command line, and interpretted by R, vs. button clicking in R, in a nice IDE that's comfortable and approachable for non-programmers.
E.G. le tooling debate du jour, oui oui, monsieur...
In the video at the very start he mentions that the title of the talk is provocative, but when it's used as a title for posting on a site like this, it can obviously backfire a bit.
In the Q&A at the end, the very last question asked (regarding visual pipeline GUI's or something like that) was the content probably most directly related to the title.
What I think is interesting is that even though he's largely correct, in the real world the ease of use of approachable UI's, even if built on top of objectively substandard application cores, very often wins the race, at least until the next "shift" occurs. This has saved Microsoft's bacon more than once in history.
Also, the article does state what Hadley's take on the question is:
"As Wickham defines data science as “the process by which data becomes understanding, knowledge, and insight”, he advocates using data science tools where value is gained from iteration, surprise, reproducibility, and scalability. In particular, he argues that being a data scientist and being programmer are not mutually exclusive and that using a programming language helps data scientists towards understanding the real signal within their data. "
