What is the relevance of Dunning-Kruger? I've always taken the practical meaning of Dunning-Kruger to be that there's always room for self-doubt, though certainty may be increased the more external validation you get. The GP's comment does not seem any more certain than the average comment here.
While a valiant effort of you to meta-snark (couldn't help it, could you?), there's nothing much to "understand" about it. It's a well known experimental study. And it wasn't quoted here as a scientific citation -- just as a well known metaphor for "don't overestimate your smarts, kid".
>The fact that it was used in earnest without presenting any justification just makes it all the more hilarious, unintentionally so.
"Without presenting any justification"? What exactly do you thing this is? Some academic forum on psychology where we study cognitive issues?
He have, here, an exchange on programming languages, where the parent put down whole classes of programmers as inferior (to some unmentioned higher standard) with rigorous hand waving and a few invalid arguments -- several of which I refuted.
The reference to a cognitive superiority bias was given in this context, as a token "and who do you think you are" gesture. Nobody said that this was a clinically verified case of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action -- or that it was the core of the conversation anyway (it's a single link at the very bottom of a 450 word reply).
I know some people on HN tend to be pedantic, but you should not let pedantry ruin your ability to hold a conversation (AKA, the "well, actually" effect: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html ).
Either way, I didn't get that the OP wanted to put down other developers, rather that the language designers did, by "simplifying" their languages by sticking to tradition and leaving crucial features out, and needless features in.
In that it's not wise to put people using other languages (such as Java etc) as "lesser programmers", just because you think you're so much better for using something else.
People tend to overestimate their smarts -- and those kind of inane comments about whole language ecosystems are not exactly signs of brightness.
I don't think anybody (that is, more than a few outliers) said anything about Java being "boring" back then. It's in the last 5-7 years, after J2EE came out of favour, that is in vogue to say these kind of things. And I know that, because I was around back then. Java was supposed to be safer, yes, but nobody said it was supposed to be boring or targeted to enterprise drones. On the contrary, it was deemed "revolutionary" and the language of the rich web (because of applets).
>1) created for people less smart than the designers
Well, most programmers are indeed less smart than Ken Thompson or Rob Pike, so that would be a good call IF it was true.
But from what I have read, it was created to be the perfect language FOR it's designers, scratching THEIR pain points -- not targeted to some inferior programmers. And it's designers were and are are very fond of the language and heavy users of it.
So, I don't see where you got your (1) point.
>2) designed to be easy to use in a corporate environment with large teams of varying abilities (the 'simplicity', which is really more familiarity: most people can write boilerplate filled imperative C-family language style code already).
Who said Go is about 'boilerplate'? One of the design goals was to reduce boilerplate, and in practice it's very succint, eg. to get the same thing going, compared to Python code.
>3) attempts to make certain types of errors harder than the languages it replaces (in Java thats memory errors, in Go it's concurrency errors), but by ignoring established PL research still gives you a big gun that is loaded and aimed at your foot (doing concurrency in Java with threads and locks, NULL and deadlocks in Go, etc). i.e. very conservative when it comes to adopting PL ideas, but perhaps bringing one old idea to the mainstream, and being prepared to make a lot of sacrifices (to ensure an 'easy' language) to get people on board with that one idea.
So, in essence, it's not a hodgepodge of newfangled PL research like Haskell. Sounds good to me.
>The amusing thing is that the creators of Go are some of the fiercest critics of Java, but they have created something that seems to follow a very similar philosophy to the original Java.
Well, they are not critics of the original Java. Matter of fact, some of them have also programmed lots of in Java in the past.
>I don't mean this as a slight against Go (or Java!). I just find the comparison illuminating.
Well, you sure sound like you do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect