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Here's the original Rob Pike quote:

> 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.

The source seems to be MSDN, but the link has bit-rotted. https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/Fr...

This attitude I think is the reason most experienced deveploers I've worked with are put off by the language. You don't have to be a "researcher" to understand sum types or generics. There's a large part of the industry that thinks we should limit ourselves to concepts that can be understood by a beginner, and I think it's holding the industry back. I can't think of another industry where people think this way.

That seems like a pragmatic and honest way of looking at software engineering, consistent with Russ Cox's later thoughts on the difference between programming and software engineering[1]. It sounds to me less like “this is a language for beginners and underperformers” and more like “this is a language using which large teams of programmers with varying levels of experience can be productive together”.

> This attitude I think is the reason most experienced deveploers I've worked with are put off by the language.

This is not my experience. Of the six team leads with whom I've discussed the language (after they've had some experience with it) only one was put off by it. The rest were either glad that “something simpler is finally here” or were of the opinion that Go is “just another language”.

(Interestingly enough, the one person who was not impressed was a big fan of purely functional programming, while all others were C++/Java/Ruby kind of people. Which is consistent with my own personal observation that fans of purely functional languages tend to dislike Go, for the most part.)

[1]: https://research.swtch.com/vgo-eng

As a fan of pure functional programming who very much dislikes Go, I can vouch for this statement. But in the spirit of giving credit where due one thing that the pure functional crowd can learn from Go is the value in making really good tooling and really try to genuinely make easy things easy.

> Which is consistent with my own personal observation that fans of purely functional languages tend to dislike Go, for the most part.)

It's not only your personal observation (though I would remove the "purely" from "purely functional languages). A good indication of that: on the Go 2020 survey, the 6 most popular responses to "Which critical language features do you need that are no available in Go?" are features that functional programming languages have. All of these features are in ML and its descendants (SML, OCaml, Haskell, Scala, etc).

The graph: https://go.dev/blog/survey2020/missing_features.svg

The article: https://go.dev/blog/survey2020-results

Of the top 6 features in this chart, I see only two that are associated with functional languages: the vague "functional language features" catch-all, and ADTs. The rest is commonly found in mainstream imperative languages today.

My point is that functional languages have all these features, even if some are found in non-functional languages these days. Even functional langauges themselves are often not only functional. You can do OO in Scala, imperative and OO in OCaml. OCaml is actually a good example to talk about, as the recent developments are all about adding multicore, better concurrency and better tooling, something that Go was very good at from the start.

In a way, you can see that the people using these languages that may appear very different are converging to the same "ideal". And that's not a surprise, both languages have a very Unix-y origin, and origin in Pascal/Modula. Go added to that CSP, OCaml added ML. These days OCaml is adding things to better handle the CSP part, and some people are asking for Go to better handle the ML part.

> There's a large part of the industry that thinks we should limit ourselves to concepts that can be understood by a beginner

I've never fully understood this weird obsession either. You'd never hear a group of master craftsmen like plumbers or masons talking about making their tools and trade more "beginner friendly". They naturally expect beginners to learn the trade and eventually become masters themselves.

The cynic in me thinks it's large corporations that are pushing the whole "beginner friendly" narrative as a way to keep employees both 1) lower-skilled and 2) productive. If you help beginners develop into intermediate and then advanced programmers, guess what? You have to pay them more.

> If you help beginners develop into intermediate and then advanced programmers, guess what? You have to pay them more.

That doesn't seem like a good argument with regards to Go specifically, since Go is among the most high-paying technologies, at least according to Stack Overflow surveys[1]. At the same level as “LISP” (which Lisp is it, StackOverflow?) and only slightly below Rust and Scala, both of which are way more complex languages.

[1]: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-top-p...

> Go is among the most high-paying technologies

I like go just fine, and I'm learning it as we speak. But I think the high pay scale has more to do with *where* it's being used more than anything else.

Go is very popular in SV, whereas most fortune 500 and other legacy companies are java world.

My issue is more with this current obsession that everything must be beginner friendly. The fact is beginners don't stay beginners very long, so it's a dumb group to optimize for.

I don't think this is a very good analogy. The craftsmen I know use basic, simple tools that work well. They just handle them masterfully. The more complex tools are often for beginners who need the hand holding.

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