When people focus on a language, they tend to think only about the language and not the ecosystem around it. Yes, Java 8 has closures, but then again it will be

When people focus on a language, they tend to think only about the language and not the ecosystem around it. Yes, Java 8 has closures, but then again it will be a very long time until the ecosystem will move to using them. And for example, even though Scala has baked-in features to make functional programming much more pleasant / practical, it's not those features that position it as a functional programming language, but rather the ecosystem around it. In other words, even though you can mostly use a language that has closures in an FP fashion (and people did so with languages like Java or Javascript), it's painful doing so not only because of the language and the standard library, but also because the other people and the supporting libraries are not doing that and then you're the weirdo that swims against the tide. On the other hand the JVM on the whole is an extremely good platform and given that one can use on top alternative languages that do make a difference, like Scala, Clojure, Ceylon or Groovy, well that's the comparison I'd like to see ... the JVM versus Go. On your arguments - Java's checked exceptions are deeply broken IMHO, but something that works much better in the context of a static language are types such as `Try[T]`, `Either[L,R]`, `Option[T]` or `Validation[E,A]` from Scala. They achieve their purpose of documenting the error in the function's signature and can do much more than exceptions can, they force you to either deal with it or escalate and their API is very comfortable. Unfortunately whenever you bring these into a discussion, people dismiss them because you know, monads and applicative functors are apparently too "academical". But we keep reinventing broken wheels, because we can't bother to learn anything else that isn't in the gang of four. On Go my personal opinion is that it is a very poor choice compared to the JVM, even when speaking about Go's strongest points, like performance and concurrency and yes, I believe that the JVM is a strong winner on all points. But then I wouldn't expect people that have chosen Node.js or Python/Gevent to start making good decisions.