As much as I like pg's essays generally I don't particularly like his essays on hardcore programming topics like language design. Maybe it is because I am inexperienced in most of the topics he discusses in his essays but I am quite experienced in programming.

Some reactions to the essay:

"I predict a similar fate for Java"

It is ridiculous that pg once said he does not know Java at all. Yet he expresses his opinions about it. How can I take his opinion seriously as someone who knows almost the whole language specification of Java by head and had been programming in Java for at least 9 years? It is not only knowing the language which is important. But knowing all those problem patterns that have to be solved at typical enterprise projects. These projects are inherently complicated and has a lot to do with databases (and less with expressing nice and elegant algorithms). Java is not a particularly good language, but without developing a lot for in enterprise projects you really don't know what is needed by those projects. That said my favourite language is Scala. It ihas all the advantages of Java and the Java platform but it is a much better language than Java. It is not a 'pure' language. Pure languages never really do well for widespread practical use.

"I think it's important not just that the axioms be well chosen, but that there be few of them. Mathematicians have always felt this way about axioms-- the fewer, the better-- and I think they're onto something."

First the core language in mathematics (the language of first order logic) is orthogonal to axioms. You can have a language with simple syntax (some math books define such a minimalistic language for first order logic), but it will not be good for practical use and will not be concise. So for practical use and for conciseness mathematicians have introduced plently of notations. (e.g. typographical conventions for differentiation, integration, infix syntax for addition, multiplication, etc...), etc. The real-world language that mathematicians use day-to-day is more like let's say Scala than a very pure language.

Axioms (and theorems derived from them) are more like libraries. There are plenty of axiom systems: (separate for numbers, geomerty, etc...) The whole mathematics is something like the Java ecosystem: lots of libraries.

What pg speaks about is some kind of utopia. A world where all programmers have to do is to express elegant algorithms. But programmers have to solve complex problems which mostly don't have an elegant solution at all. 100 years later we will still not have incredibly elegant solutions for our then hard problems. Even mathematicians don't always have elegant minimalistic solutions for their problems. Andrew Wiles worked for 10 years to prove his theorem. The proof is the result of lots of work and knowledge, and is incredibly complex. It does not fit on the margin at all.

Just look at natural languages: they are incredibly useful and concise in some sense, but they are incredibly complex. Programming languages will never be so complex, but they will not necessarily be extremely simple either.

Edit: I love minimalism, and I hate convoluted overcomplicated libraries and code bases, and I hate very leaky abstractions. The smaller the code base is the better: this is my main philosophy. But I still think that pg goes too far with his utopia for simplicity. I think that simplicity and conciseness of application code requires some complexity and intricacy on the core language and libraries side.