"I don't mean this as a slight against Go, or Java. I'm just saying it's made for people of a certain level of intelligence and designed for use at giant corporations."
Assuming you are saying that those things are a contradiction I don't agree. It's a perfectly legitimate position to design a language to have fewer 'advanced' features; it makes it easier to learn, there are fewer ways to trip yourself up unexpectedly. Of course on the other hand you may find yourself re-inventing the advanced language features yourself, probably not as well, or committing errors that could have been prevented. I don't think there is a right answer. Go takes a position, and that position is similar to the one taken by the original Java.
Anyway, you took my post in the wrong light. I used insults like those because I was using the language of Java critics[1], which was, you know, the joke. The intelligence one in particular was a riff on an insult by a good friend of yours:
Like the creators of sitcoms or junk food or package tours, Java’s designers were consciously designing a product for people not as smart as them. — Paul Graham
The Go creators definitely enjoy their language themselves. They designed the language that they personally would want to work with.
"For too long to admit to here, C was my language of choice, but I have used many languages through my career. Nowadays almost everything I write is in Go; it is the most productive language I have ever used and has displaced C completely from my toolbox." [0]
https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions/332768653
You're absolutely right that it's an opinionated language, but having used both for production code, I don't at all see the parallel to Java.
Am I supposed to infer some opinion from you on that? I'm not sure if you were just summarizing or have a fundamental disagreement with the stance, which you thought would be self evident.
He will use the best language for the problem/domain at hand.
Even if OP is right and GO is a "simpler" language than others, if it allows to solve a range of problems without the added mental load required by, say, C++ why should't he use it ?
Since sharing source code with as wide an audience of programmers as possible will almost always bring increased value to your system, then using a language that can be widely understood and modified safely makes it the best language for the problem/domain at hand.
I can agree with that. I also believe that using a simple tool does not presuppose simple outcomes. To me the rewording looked like a fairly neutral assessment of a few language features.
What I was fishing for was if there was some positive of negative opinion behind them and what it was driven by. Without that the comment seemed fairly useless, and I'm fairly sure tptacek's not shy about sharing his opinion. ;)
That is a false dichotomy, and a particularly dishonest one at that. The options are not write complicated code in a modern language vs write boring code in an obsolete language. Go is bad because it gives the programmer poor tools to write any kind of code to solve difficult problems, boring or otherwise. Basic simple functionality that has been established for decades is being ignored because people insist on pretending that having a good language is somehow a problem and makes code complicated.
"I don't mean to boast, but I'm awesome" would be a similar statement. Trying to defeat criticism by deflecting the critique at the root, while actually fulfilling said critique is a common argumentative tactic that, while noble in its attempts to avoid offense, is intellectually dishonest.
The designers are not omniscient, and their desires mean nothing in the real world, beyond how the product of their will is actually used.
All that's just a long winded way of saying that who it's made for and who finds good use out of it are not entirely equivalent. As such the tptacek's statement seemed very neutral to me.