I don't know how you think that was the point. He doesn't say anything like that. In fact he takes the exact opposite position when dealing with parsing, saying to just write more code. Why would something which literally requires no extra effort (producing useful error messages without semicolons) be misdirected effort, while writing a more complex parser is cool?
I re-read the article and I concluded that we are both right.
I direct you to the following statement:
"The principles are rarely orthogonal and frequently conflict."
Producing genuinely useful error messages at all requires a complex parser, IMHO. It's not computationally obvious to look at a line of code and say 'actually you just missed this one character'. Requiring a terminating character gives you at least a sanity check starting point to work with - it alone will catch whole categories of errors.
