It's nice when the proponents of a piece of technology can be honest about its shortcomings and acknowledge them, rather than trying to sell their technology. It's the honest response vs. the fanboy response.
Problem: "It's too slow."
Honest response: "Yeah, sometimes it is slow. Here are the design compromises that make this slowness necessary. Furthermore nobody has volunteered the manpower to make it faster. If you need something faster, try x."
Fanboy response: "Yeah well, anytime I try to do something, it's fast enough."
Problem: "There's practically no static typechecking."
Honest response: "You're right, there isn't. There are ways you can deal with that, such as writing tests and thinking carefully about your code. The lack of static typechecking allows us to build a language that is better in this way and in that way. If you want static typechecking, try language x. Certainly there are advantages and disadvantages to the way we did things, but it best suited our objectives and if your objectives are aligned with ours, consider using our system."
Fanboy response: "Yeah well, if you're relying on a compiler to catch all your bugs, you're in trouble."
I know there are a lot of C++ haters here but having read some of what Bjarne Stroustrup has written, he typically offers honest responses, not fanboy responses. I was impressed with an article on the Arch Linux wiki once for the same reasons, as it gave an honest response to "it takes too long to install" (which was something like "yeah, it takes awhile, which has advantages and disadvantages. Try Ubuntu for quick installs.") rather than a fanboy response ("quick installs, who wants that crap anyway, it will just give you a junk system.")
To be fair to GVR this was a short informal article; it may not be fair to expect him to expound in this kind of a format.