So "the author" is Alex Martelli, a long-time Python user, contributor, and winner of the 2006 Frank Willison award which is given each year for outstanding contribution to the Python community.

I highly doubt he's "ignorant" of anything when it comes to Python...

A better theory is this article is from 2003, but the ast module was added in Python 2.6, which was released in 2008.

(I agree with everything you've said in the second and third paragraphs, but, man, try to give people a little credit before you assume they're ignorant, 'k?)