But when this has been going on for 20 years, you have an accretion of features that don't quite hang together and collectively are a royal pain to deal with. E

But when this has been going on for 20 years, you have an accretion of features that don't quite hang together and collectively are a royal pain to deal with. Eventually enough folks get fed up with this state that a new language can gain critical mass, and the cycle starts over again. I agree, but Java the language hasn't become much more complicated. In fact, it's development has been quite glacial, one of the reasons that some JVM-minded people switch to Scala. Probably the larger problem is that Java (to the Python/Ruby and now Go crowd) became associated with applets and big and ugly frameworks that require heaps of XML. However, Java the language doesn't differ all that much from Go. Java is better in some respects (generics, checked exceptions) and Go is nicer in some respects (closures). However, Java has an insanely great runtime (JVM) that can be fully instrumented, supports hot code swapping (some natively, DCEVM, JRebel). It also has a zillion great libraries, good IDEs, great web frameworks (that don't require writing XML), etc. Go will be popular in start ups, etc. Some people will take it into big corps (as happened with Python and Ruby). But to be used widely in the industry, it needs everything and more than the JVM or .NET offer.