Most of the comments seem a bit critical. I don't think the author is naively suggesting "this needs to be better@#!!!". Not all ideas have to be practical or even feasible; it's beneficial to at least consider everything. The payoff on a truly new / useful abstraction could be huge. Think of C with / without the preprocessor.

Or take a language like Scala, which I happen to like a lot, but has one hellaciously complex type system: how much would it benefit from an additional syntax abstraction? This question is worth asking!

I like the columns of code idea a lot, and it's something I've thought about for a long time. But my conclusion so far is that this is actually better done with IDE functionality. Just establish a common annotation for metadata which IDEs interpret as a display configuration. Or have the IDE open a .src file and a .doc file in the same directory, displayed side by side. The doc file has the same line count as the .src file, and there are conventions / macros / etc. that make use of the second column, etc. (Of course the .doc could be compressed into some kind of metadata file when stored.)

To bring it back to the topic, aren't we all REALLY interested in something that makes coding... just, better?