The creators thought that having 50% of your codebase be `if (err != nil) { ... }` was a good idea. And that channels somehow make sense in a world without pattern matching or generics. So yeah, it's a bizarrely idiosyncratic language - albeit with moments of brilliance (like structural typing).
I actually think Java is the better PL, but the worse runtime (in what world are 10s GC pauses ever acceptable). Java has an amazing standard library as well - Golang doesn't even have many basic data structures implemented. And the ones it does, like heap, are absolutely awful to use.
I really just view Golang nowadays as a nicer C with garbage collection, useful for building self contained portable binaries.
> I actually think Java is the better PL, but the worse runtime (in what world are 10s GC pauses ever acceptable).
This seems like a very odd/outdated criticism. 10s CMS full STW GCs are a thing of the past. There are low-latency GCs available for free in OpenJDK now with sub-millisecond pause times. Where I've seen the two runtimes compared (e.g. Coinbase used both langs in latency-sensitive exchange components) Java's has generally come out ahead.
Yes, probably out of date. Memory management was always the JVMs Achilles heel (either long pause times or too much memory usage). If that’s fixed in recent JDKs, awesome.
I think Java made many decisions that turned out to be bad only in retrospect. In Go we knew (well, experts knew) already that the choices were bad.
Java is a child of the 90s. My full rant at https://blog.habets.se/2022/08/Java-a-fractal-of-bad-experim... :-)