Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you're referring to this quote by Pike:

"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt." (from this presentation).

Under the context he's in, I don't think he ever meant anything along the lines of it being for "n00bs". It's all about simplicity. They brought what they learned from their work at Bell Labs, Lucent and Google and applied new ideas with a familiar paradigm.


Edit: P.S: How do you quote other people's replies? I tried to quote jkl's but it didn't seem to work with the button. Thanks in advance.