Perhaps what he's trying to say is that he's more interested in making programming more interesting and accessible for 1000 more children than he is in making an application able to scale up to 100,000 more users.

I don't read anything from Guido, so I don't know how he thinks, but I would interpret this as meaning that he doesn't see anything new and exciting in Go, but that he does in Scratch. That alone forms a comparison. A programming language that kids could actaully learn that would let them make web games that they could share with their friends definitely seems like it would be cool. What does Go offer that we can't already do?

I don't see it as cryptic. He just said "it's a toy". Also: oranges are way better than apples

I don't see it as a cryptic remark; it does seem like a bit of an inkblot to some folks, though.

I don't think they can be compared, he appears to be stating a preference (not dismissing go).

I imagine he thinks that Scratch has more interesting and compelling features as a language that tried to do new things than Go does. I personally found Go to be very underwhelming and think that if it wasn't riding the Google wave (pun kinda intended), nobody would give it a second look. Theres simply more interesting languages out there (and, in its own way, Scratch is more interesting to me and seemingly to Guido. Hell, you can even do concurrent programming in Scratch :-P)

Scratch, Squeak and other similar environments follow the leading of Seymour Papert and his Logo language:

low threshold and no ceiling

For that they are different, and for that they are interesting.

http://scratch.mit.edu/

http://golang.org/

http://twitter.com/gvanrossum