I think all of the things you point out are probably true. But I still prefer Go. And I'm probably not the kind of person you imagine. I'm in my 50s. I used

I think all of the things you point out are probably true. But I still prefer Go. And I'm probably not the kind of person you imagine. I'm in my 50s. I used Java for ~20 years. I spent a lot of time developing efficient programming practices in Java and teaching those to both junior developers and people with decades of experience. I'm also not someone who takes a language switch lightly. It takes much, much longer to become reasonably competent in a programming language and I think that if you are going to choose a "workhorse language", you kind of need to see it as a decade long investment. You don't learn a language in a year. I switched to Go mostly because it is a nicer language for what I do (servers). But I can fully understand why someone would flee Java. Java has a lot of baggage in the shape of legacy code. When people talk about languages they tend to talk about them as if we all live in a fantasy world where we can write new programs from scratch all the time. But that isn't reality for most programmers. Most programmers aren't starting projects from scratch - they work on stuff that has already existed for a while. Java has been around for a long time. Which means that every version of the language, every fad, every architectural trend, everything that has happened in almost 3 decades of Java exists at the same time in codebases that are alive and kicking. When developers get a job, this is what they are faced with. The same is true for C++. Yes, the most recent language spec is a nicer language than what you had 10 or 20 years ago. But that probably isn't the language you get to use when you join a company and start to work on their product. The reason people choose different languages when they do start from scratch (do a startup) probably isn't entirely rational. I suspect a lot of people avoid languages where they have encountered large legacy codebases full of frustrating code that is done in a out of fashion way. I chose to switch to Go, despite having 20 years invested in Java, because Go has the features I need in a language and isn't cluttered with much of what I don't need. It has nicer tooling that just works better for everyday things. It also has a healthier approach to how you design stuff: it isn't dominated by large frameworks. I don't have to teach Go programmers minimalism and have "experienced" programmers throw tantrums because they feel threatened when having to re-learn how to program Java. To be honest, I shudder a bit when thinking about going back to Java. It has so much stuff to deal with when reading other people's code. It doesn't feel like it is worth my time. I can't go back to that. My time is too valuable to me. (I probably should point out that I did decide that I had better find an alternative to Java when Oracle showed itself to be untrustworthy and litigious. But it took years to find both the opportunity to leave Java and the language to leave Java for)