That was not the point of the statement. The argument (possibly poorly phrased) was the there are people people out there that are comfortable with manipulating arrays of numbers than there are programmers who are capable of writing a Java program.

So, if the goal is to make it easier for someone to take the leap from a spreadsheet to a programming language, array languages are likely an easier hill to climb (people already familiar with, say, Python, might struggle, but they are not likely to be interested in learning a new programming paradigm anyway).