His proposal from this EWD was actually realized, when people trying to reduce mathematics to mathematical logic and purely formal manipulation introduced the "New Math" movement, and it was a disaster. Even mathematicians don't typically do mathematics via purely formal methods, and software engineering is much more an ... engineering discipline. In fact, his is a very mediocre philosophically voice in a debate about formalism (the stream in philosophy of mathematics) that has been ongoing for centuries, in which people like Leibniz, Turing, Poincare, Hilbert etc. participated, and from this perspective there is nothing to admire about this essay, except maybe some peculiar form of elegance of writing style.