No, I believe he meant writing. I have been doing this for a very long time and while my background is in sys admin and network engineering I have also, for fun and out of necessity learned many languages.

Sys admin and network engineering skills for a very rudimentary basic foundation. Without these a security expert is not well rounded. Programming and database skills are also essential as unless you work for a company who has millions upon millions to spend you will find yourself behind a Linux machine running, modifying, and writing open source tools to do your job. (if you are not and you do not have millions in software then IMHO you are not doing your job!!) The other issue as I see it is that there are three aspects to security: prevention, detection, and reaction. Any sys admin or network engineer can fill the roll for prevention. This is not where an experts value really comes in. The experts value comes in in designing the "Intelligence infrastructure", meaning how information is gathered such that detection and reaction can be accomplished in an optimal way, and leveraging the intelligence infrastructure for valuable information which includes identifying security incidents, misconfigured devices and servers, and investigating both security incidents and HR or "resume generating" events.

My 2 cents...

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