I wouldn't say so, when Java was 5 years old there was Forte4j, Netbeans and VisualAge for Java and Eclipse 1.0 [1]. All of them offered superior tooling to the

I wouldn't say so, when Java was 5 years old there was Forte4j, Netbeans and VisualAge for Java and Eclipse 1.0 [1]. All of them offered superior tooling to then major language as C and C++. People wanted nice IDEs, and majority didn't want Emacs and Vi(m). And Java was already in top 3 language. Go is nowhere near Java's success, even considering its age. If Google didn't bother to provide a great IDE support so far, and is not pushing for Go in a way Apple was pushing for Objective C, there's no evidence that it won't end up as just yet another abandonware from Google. [1] Writing from memory, so might be wrong.