He makes an important distinction in two kinds of exploratory programming, and just sort of is unlucky that he needs the second kind (whereas I'm happy, as I need the first kind)
I think there are two different kinds of exploratory
programming. The first I'll call the "Lisp model", where
you are building a system from scratch, without external
dependencies. The second, which I believe is much more
common, is the "Perl/Python model", where you are
interacting with existing systems and building on previous
work.