I'm going to have to infer what you mean by that snark.
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
> Java’s designers were consciously designing a product for people not as smart as them
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]
It's worth watching the Advanced Go Concurrency talk from I/O before judging whether Go is designed for below-average developers. They throw up a plausible code sample near the beginning that has multiple tricky bugs. It's not a very forgiving language if you aren't meticulous about how you use it, which I've also found to be true of Ruby (perhaps this is true of expressive languages in general).
Of all pg's essays I just put the Java one down to a bad day at the office. He's obviously a. very smart guy (cf On Lisp) but some of his statements in that essay seem to be made out of genuine ignorance. Its fine to criticise the language but to criticise the users who at the time were mainly ex c++ many of whom built systems in their time that were elegant, reliable, scalable etc, was a mistake - I think.
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
[1] http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/java