I interpreted moat here to mean "killer feature". It seems the best pitch on this thread is "it's like Go but not" or "it's like Ruby but not".

An imitable killer feature isn't a moat, so the terms shouldn't be used interchangeably. And moats are often sort of broadly anti-social, or at best a necessary "cost" of letting the work get done. Network effects and platform advantages are that way, for example.

But I would think that as hackers, when we praise a programming language, we often have in mind virtues that are freely transportable to other programming languages; intrinsic achievements that can be learned from and applied broadly.

I want my programming languages to be lovely, concise, clear, expressive, powerful, fun, insightful, mind-bending, illustrative, flexible, convenient, well-integrated, well-founded, efficient, safe, or helpful. I don't want them to have moats. I don't want to have to say "I'm using this because I (or my industry) started using it years ago and it's sticky"; I want to be so lucky as to get to say "I'm using this because it's good"!

Maybe a minor semantic dispute in the eyes of some, maybe a kind of excessive literalism on my part, maybe a futile resistance to to concept creep, old man yelling at cloud.

But ykwim?