C'mon. We're talking about a spectrum here. It's not some binary game where either you A) work to the exclusion of every other thing in your life, or B) play so hard you end up broke and without any salable skills. There's a middle ground in there, and not even such a little one. And if I might presume to speak for the author here, I'm pretty sure it's that middle ground he's advocating we shoot for.
I think what you're suggesting is a great way to end up miserable, friendless, and alone. And those are three things all the money in the world can't fix.
LINQ + lambdas are great at this. Simple example: say you have a list of Car objects, and you want to get a new list comprising only the cars whose engines have greater than 300 horsepower, sort them in order of increasing price/horsepower ratio, and then take the top 20. In most languages, this requires a bunch of loops. In C#, it looks like this:
This results in a lazy-evaluated evaluated expression that works exactly the same whether cars is an in-memory list, a SQL table, a RavenDB collection, or anything else that implements the right interface (IEnumerable). It's not only concise, but also self-documenting. The syntax implies the semantics.
I think what you're suggesting is a great way to end up miserable, friendless, and alone. And those are three things all the money in the world can't fix.