I can definitely see the tradeoffs of choosing between Java's bad namespacing conventions and lack of type inference, but keep in mind you're comparing to a 20

I can definitely see the tradeoffs of choosing between Java's bad namespacing conventions and lack of type inference, but keep in mind you're comparing to a 20 year old language. Other languages (i.e. C#, Nim) have learned from Java's mistakes. Go hasn't; they've just gone back to making most of C's mistakes (in type systems). I've no particular love for Java's type system, but I can't criticize it as much because it was a lot more reasonable when it was released (1996). In 2016 there's no excuse for having a type system as broken as Go's.