I have a slight bone to pick with the author's statement that Unix is homoiconic – sure, I can tail and patch a file, but it doesn't mean that I can seamlessly and quickly manipulate, generate, and execute the canonical representation of executable code in the same way that I can do with s-expressions, quote/quasiquote and eval. I think the bar for meaningful homoiconicity is should at least be raised to include that.

If "I can read my source just into the canonical datatype" was the standard for an environment to be meaningfully homoiconic, you could easily argue that bare metal was homoiconic for the same reason. And in fact I'd argue that it would be easier to hand-assemble VAX instructions to write more opcodes in memory (because the VAX-11 had such an extensive and convenient instruction set, especially all of the three-operand bit swizzling and manipulation instructions) than to do C code generation with a base Unix environment.