But then people can just shift the argument around to the word "powerful". Unlike electricity where "power" is composed of just 2 dimensions (voltage and current), "power" in a language has hundreds of dimensions.

If for one programmer, the "interesting" things in Go include ultra fast compile times, builtin concurrency primitives, network library, etc, then to him, "Go is more powerful than C++."

The disagreement over what dimensional components of "powerful" is worth comparing then feeds more debates (and implied judgments of language worthiness).