[glurgh]

you're making a fallacy of appeal to authority.

I'm not. I'm not saying anything about the quality of his argument, I'm talking about the stridently poor quality of your initial one which boils down to 'he doesn't know what he's talking about'. I think that's trivially and factually refutable.

I do think what he's trying to argue is both interesting and difficult and I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced by it. It doesn't merit 'he's clueless' and saying that does a disservice to both the paper and the discussion here.

Your later, concrete objections are actual objections but I don't feel I've understood the paper well enough to engage in them. I'd only say I'm also unsure whether they're really about what the paper is about. The fact that many, in fact most, programming formalisms and paradigms are largely isomorphic is both well-understood and rarely a source of practical insight, which is the stated goal of the paper.

[I guess this is now also a reply to a post that was heavily edited while I was replying to it]