Back in 2012 I was considerably better-versed in Java (it was the main language for my CS education and a bunch of my hobby stuff). Still, I ended up picking Go

Back in 2012 I was considerably better-versed in Java (it was the main language for my CS education and a bunch of my hobby stuff). Still, I ended up picking Go because it was so much easier--no need to deal with Maven or Gradle or the alternatives, no need to pick a testing framework or a test runner, no need to configure CI jobs to publish documentation or source code packages, no need to run some external web server process, no need to worry about runtime dependencies (including the JVM itself), etc. No need to navigate an ecosystem (including stdlib) riddled with inheritance and other antipatterns, etc. No need to get a master's degree in tuning the JVM. Text editor plugins just worked. `gofmt` existed and was ubiquitous. The language itself was far smaller and it had native, idiomatic value types from inception!. Everything about Go was just so much easier than Java.