This is short by the standard of well-considered material of durable merit warranting serious reflection.
It's not short by the standard of contemporary consumable Internet content, which is to be expected, as most of that content is not designed to enlighten. It's designed to catch your attention long enough to tell you about a brand, whether corporate (advertising) or personal (blogging).
And at any rate, serious writing implicitly asks for an investment of time in contemplation above and beyond line scan time, so its 'reading time' is only loosely coupled to the apparent length of the material. Making that investment increases the payoff, it doesn't dilute it. "You get out of it what you put into it."
If content consumption time is directly linearly related to content length, that's a pretty good flag that you're probably not getting much real value out of it. I've found low value content to be a difficult honeypot to resist even on HN, which is comparatively a pretty high-quality aggregator.
This is one of the best HN submissions I've ever seen. Given its due respect, it could change lives.
I think this is more of a meta-level write-up on being a programmer. For example, take a look at the "How to Know When to Apply Fancy Computer Science" and "How to Talk to Non-Engineers" sections.
Furthermore, I think that the writing is clear and succinct. I wish I had this when I started programming.
