I wouldn't trust Joel Spolsky's code expertise -- just look at Excel internals!
Nevertheless, Stack Overflow is super cool. But that tells nothing about its architectural quality.
Billionaire title doesn't make scientific claims any more true. Tom Cruise may be billionaire too, but claims to believe in some crap, for whatever reasons.
Just to make my point clear, I'm not against J. Simons. I'm against using billionaire titles for defending scientific theories.
The article seems to be published in the Journal of High Energy Physics, which is considered seriously by physicists [0]. That title would be a valid response to schlagetown, of course.
That article is ancient, and has drawbacks discussed in other places.
Everyone interested has already seen it (its googleable by just "javascript inheritance").
Many great people did drugs. But don't mess correlation with causation please. Maybe great people are just more predisposed to drugs, while drugs actually harmed them.