The author is not saying "write C in Python," he's saying "Aim for C-style abstractions in Python." i.e. build the codebase around the bread-and-butter: function calls, iteration, reference-passing and mutability, and not around abuse of the numerous higher-level abstractions available(meta-programming, yield, exec()...). It's a lesson learned regularly by programmers as they gain experience and move towards conservativism, after having seen all their silver bullet attempts go up in flames.

A similar tenet holds for the opposite direction - the performance junkies; the tendency with experience to move away from locking in specs early and doing heavy micro-optimization, towards writing the initial code in a way that tries intentionally to make it easy to modify.