[projektfu]

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.

[zozbot234]

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.