Flamebait? It's literally what the designers of Golang said publicly about the background of prospective developers, and how that constrained the language design:
"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."
Nowhere in this quote are these fresh grads equated to "lousy programmers", though (which the flamebaity comment did).
And interpreting the quote charitably I'm going to have to agree with it - I don't think many of my coworkers care enough to get to the point where they'd appreciate everything something like Haskell can do for them.
Have you ever worked with fresh grads? They're definitionally lousy programmers, if we take lousy mean "having a propensity to inject bugs into programs".
The more time you spend in software engineering the more you realize that this is actually brilliant and helpful, not bad. And IME, the more expressivity I have fluently at my disposal, the more complexity I tend to create. I’m not saying I don’t enjoy more complex languages, but reducing cognitive load and easing collaboration with more junior engineers are easily the best features of Go, hands down (although I can’t say the new generics necessarily always help with that).
That's one interpretation but I think Pike was using a sarcastic meaning for brilliant. I think he's saying that he wants to mentor people to become programmers, not to learn a difficult, sublime language. It's like when a top scientist tells you they're not smart enough to understand what's going on in some part of his field. It's not necessarily a compliment.
Feel free to listen to the context at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/lang-next-2014/from-... around 20:40 to 21:10. It's pretty clear that it's a serious quote and not "sarcastic" at all. Least of all about research languages since Pike mentions CSP at length and how to make concurrency be not "scary" to prospective users - overall, it seems that he's talking about a real constraint he's facing. In the same talk he's even apologetic for not preventing data races in the language, since it would have involved too much complexity.
