The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.
That's the quote people like to jump on. You could read it as humility or a nod to other languages, but it probably wasn't intended to be read as "we've designed a stupid language", and even if Pike agreed with that reading, he probably wouldn't agree that keeping programmers mediocre is a goal or a side-effect of a non-brilliant language. Don't mean to put words in his mouth, but the above quote obviously isn't meant to support anything like:
The criticism of Go being presented is that it's intentionally underpowered so as to make it possible for poor developers to verbosely muddle their way through to developing working real applications without actually becoming better.
Which is an extreme criticism, but it's a pretty common assumption in most of these discussions. I mean, look at the most upvoted posts in this thread.
That's the quote people like to jump on. You could read it as humility or a nod to other languages, but it probably wasn't intended to be read as "we've designed a stupid language", and even if Pike agreed with that reading, he probably wouldn't agree that keeping programmers mediocre is a goal or a side-effect of a non-brilliant language. Don't mean to put words in his mouth, but the above quote obviously isn't meant to support anything like:
The criticism of Go being presented is that it's intentionally underpowered so as to make it possible for poor developers to verbosely muddle their way through to developing working real applications without actually becoming better.
Which is an extreme criticism, but it's a pretty common assumption in most of these discussions. I mean, look at the most upvoted posts in this thread.