> And Go came along and provided an aggressively mediocre but very usable

See, that's one of the things lots of people who enjoy Perl and/or Ruby in the comments around in this thread don't quite grasp: some languages require programmers possessing a somewhat special state of mind to read and write productively, and some languages allow pretty much every mediocre programmer to read and write, and still produce a manageable program.

The other thing is the information density. In my experience, most people after graduating high school have experience with reading mainstream fiction and school textbooks, and those things you can half-skim/half-read and still get out most of the meaning. Then those people hit the college-/university-level textbooks and screech and crash because those books, you have to read them sentence by sentence; not everyone can get get used to it (or even realize they have to do that in the first place). And similar observations hold for programming languages: Perl and APL are just way too dense compared to Go and Python; if you're used to reading code line-by-line (skimming over half of them), then it's really bloody annoying to switch to reading sigil-by-sigil (as for writing, well, we all know that typing speed was never really a bottleneck for programmers).