Things Paul Graham is wrong about
I didn't read past the first point because it's dead wrong. Paul is talking about abstracting efficiency away into the compiler and presenting the programmer with a more elegant interface. As an example, Paul notes that strings and lists really should just be represented as lists and the compiler should efficiently handle lists of characters as a special case. Not only in the author completely missing Paul's point (efficiently is unimportant at the axiomatic level), the author is incorrectly applying the essay to business operations instead of programming languages. In most businesses, programming language speed is NOT the bottleneck of the operation.