I think it's effectively code for "it's not like C". Easy iteration, lambdas, generics, patterns, type inference etc...

None of these features are technically novel but they do tend to be shared by newer system languages, as opposed to C/Pascal/Fortran/Cobol and friends. Then of course there's C++ that's both old-school and modern because C++ is slowly but surely evolving to become the programming language equivalent of the Borg and eventually all other programming languages are bound to become a subset of C++.