Your parent knows how's to read code and can recognize the purpose of the second statement but not the first. While that is not some end-all metric, it does says something about the Go idiom's clarity.

Hopefully that helps explain the matter...

You missed why his comment is insightful. It's for the very reason he knows a bit about the topic but not too much.

It is. Because everyone starts out knowing zero go, and so the learning curve of a language (and for people who know another programming language first) is very much a key metric.

I know pretty much nothing about Scala. Anybody cares for my criticism of its type system? And what's with Rust and those ampersands everywhere?

GP wasn't discussing the language in general, just a small feature that depends on an idiomatic pattern used in many other places, saying "it looks gibberish." Of course it does, because it isn't idiomatic for you.

You don’t need to know that to do the comparison. If I tell you to do the same thing in one language it’s “(!:;$&)” and in another it’s “array_contains”, you don’t even need to know the languages to have a reasonable opinion on which is superior.