The exact 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

Exactly my point! I don’t think anyone can reasonably look at that quote and think “He thinks the programmers are too stupid.”

> 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

How would you phrase this? Thinking programmers are too stupid to understand languages with modern features is just the plain literal meaning of the quote, no?

It's not about intelligence, it's about not having the experience to appreciate and make good use of "brilliant" language features.

I don’t see how anyone could miss the plain literal meaning so badly. He clearly doesn’t think very highly of his colleagues.

He spent decades at Bell Labs. He was also, IIRC, in his seventies.

So a more charitable interpretation would be that most of his colleagues are in their 20s and just out of school with a CS degree. He doesn't think they can (productively) use the languages the cutting-edge PL researchers generate.

Like I said, he clearly doesn’t think very highly of them. A fresh college graduate could learn how to use sum types in a day or two.

Sure they could. Sum types aren't in go, not because fresh grads can't learn how to use sum types, but because they couldn't see a clean way to add it to go and have it fit with the other stuff they were putting in go, which they thought was more important.

But trying to get new grads to use Haskell on the scale of a 10 million line code base, and have them not make a mess of it? That's the kind of thing he didn't trust the new grads with.

Just a clarification (that doesn't really change the point), he was in his early fifties when Go was first released

> They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school

these same lowly colleagues were also incapable of wiping their asses at one point in their life but over the years and skidmarks, they all mastered that beautiful language and now make heated bidet money.

I dont know how you can read that quote and come away with anything other than "He thinks the programmers are too stupid"

I guess you’re saying “not capable of understanding a brilliant language” = “stupid”? This equivalence seems obviously wrong to me.

Even if you believe that anyone not capable of writing Rust or Haskell is stupid, it doesn’t mean that Rob Pike thinks that these people are stupid.

I think Rob Pike didn't mean brilliant as a complete compliment here. It was more an indictment on astronaut engineering of languages rather then engineers. He is literally the designer of Go and likes to program in it.