That would be fine if he had been talking about what he was doing within Google, but he was specifically talking about his dream system. Here's an analogy. "I

That would be fine if he had been talking about what he was doing within Google, but he was specifically talking about his dream system. Here's an analogy. "I have a dream about a programming language and runtime that will automatically determine how serial code can be distributed across a bunch of machines, and do so without totally screwing up performance or failure semantics. But that's somebody else's problem. I'm not even going to mention any actual ideas about how to do it." Would you say "pragmatic" is the right word to describe that? I wouldn't. We left the realm of pragmatism as soon as we started talking about dreams. It's not necessarily wrong for me to mention such a dream. Such a compiler would make my life a lot easier. However, it misses an opportunity to inspire would-be collaborators in areas where I have concrete ideas and actually am working to make a difference. It contributes less to actual progress than another answer might have, and that's disappointing.