I agree; his next answer really hits dead on for me: "power is about what becomes palatable to the programmer". This reminds me of the "conciseness conjecture" from On the expressive power of programming languages by Matthias Felleisen (http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/article/felleisen90expressive.ht...). I offer the (sub-)conjecture that palatability and concision are correlated.
