I like the sentiment but I would make some very different choices. For instance, use the . operator, because it is easier to understand than his Rube-Goldberg-logic negation groups alternative.
He’s also strangely worried about portability. If you are really concerned about portability, you are moving between languages and you probably aren’t some novice who should be frightened by complexity.
I don’t think about portability at all, ever. And I do maintain code in Perl, Python, and Javascript.
But yeah, just as in all programming languages, you can get by with knowing about a 20% subset of all it can do.