This is a silly argument and a misinterpretation of the purpose of orthogonality. Orthogonality is not a goal in itself, nor is it's purpose to eliminate redundancy. It's a tool to reduce entanglement of features. It helps simplify designs by ensuring that changes to one feature do not affect other features. This reduces the chance of unintended or inconvenient side effects when making changes. This is helpful for software architecture in general, not just programming language design.