He actually did lead a project which took this on: STEPS. (I think this is the last annual report on the project: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf) They did build a functional proof of concept which was significantly smaller/less complex than Smalltalk/Squeak which were predecessor projects he and his team worked on. Unfortunately, it's not based on the trinity of files, curly brackets and semicolons so it's not likely to take the mainstream computing world by storm.
His critical error is evident in his comparative analysis that places Physics and Programming on the same level. The systems that underly natural sciences are givens. The entire kettle of soup of software complexity boils on the fact that software engineering must first create the 'terra firma' of computing. That is the root cause of the complexity in software: it lacks a physics.
He tackles your question during the Q&A. He (and his PhD student, Dan) talk about how so much of the effort to create 'terra firma', as you call it, is caused by the terrible hardware sold to us by Intel. He argues that much of the hardware we have is just software that's been crystallized too early. If he had a machine more like an FPGA he could build all of these abstractions in powerful DSLs right down to the metal.
In physics, we don't know what the fundamental rules are, we can only see complicated outcomes and have to infer (guess) what the rules might be.
In computing, we know what the fundamental rules are (universal computation; whether that's turing machines, lambda calculus, sk logic, etc. they're all equivalent in power), but we have to deduce what the complicated outcomes are.
>In computing, we know what the fundamental rules are
In a limited way. Because we're making systems that involve people. Important and relevant aspects of human nature must go far deeper than our present understanding.
There's been numerous logics and unified methods for specifying, synthesizing, or verifying software. The problem wasn't that we didn't have one. The problem is intrinsic complexity of the domain. It leaks through in all the formalisms where the formalism gets ugly if you want to automate it and it gets clean only with much manual labor.