My personal experience of moving to using Go, along with building a small team using the language, all of us basically Java Devs, was that it was perfectly fine

My personal experience of moving to using Go, along with building a small team using the language, all of us basically Java Devs, was that it was perfectly fine to go from Java to Go. Code structure and package management were slightly sticky but getting a decent starting point on development was pretty trivial. Build, test and deploy were easy. A lot of style questions got answered by go fmt, vet and eventually golangci-lint. I recognise some of the discussions but in all honesty we just tried to be consistent in our choices. Similarly, I recognise the complaint about dead 3rd party libs but I've seen that plenty in Java too, just some of the big hitters in Java are incredibly well maintained - Spring, Hibernate etc but in 20 years of Java I've been stung plenty by unmaintained libs too. Go for us was quick to get started and proficient and whilst it's certainly not perfect a lot of the comment in the article appear to be more to do with team discussions than language choices. I've certainly had similar discussions on teams about Java and how to approach things. Anyway, no longer in that team and now in one who's main language is Python, happy to use any of Python, Java or Go and for more than just system programming but really most sorts of problem spaces. Of the 3 Go would be my default as it just works for me and love the build/test speed and even like the explicit error handling. Some things are just marmite.