Go is still not good

I personally don't like Go, and it has many shortcomings, but there is a reason it is popular regardless:

Go is a reasonably performant language that makes it pretty straightforward to write reliable, highly concurrent services that don't rely on heavy multithreading - all thanks to the goroutine model.

There really was no other reasonably popular, static, compiled language around when Google came out.

And there still barely is - the only real competitor that sits in a similar space is Java with the new virtual threads.

Languages with async/await promise something similar, but in practice are burdened with a lot of complexity (avoiding blocking in async tasks, function colouring, ...)

I'm not counting Erlang here, because it is a very different type of language...

So I'd say Go is popular despite the myriad of shortcomings, thanks to goroutines and the Google project street cred.

What modern language is a better fit for new projects in your opinion?

For web frontend: js

For ML/data: python

For backend/general purpose software: Java

The only silver bullet we know of is building on existing libraries. These are also non-accidentally the top 3 most popular languages according to any ranking worthy of consideration.

Absolutely no on Java. Even if the core language has seen improvements over the years, choosing Java almost certainly means that your team will be tied to using proprietary / enterprise tools (IntelliJ) because every time you work at a Java/C# shop, local environments are tied to IDE configurations. Not to mention Spring -- now every code review will render "Large diffs are not rendered by default." in Github because a simple module in Java must be a new class at least >500 LOC long.

I know, both proprietary and enterprise, right? https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/20... (I would also link to the Apache 2 copy of PyCharm but it wouldn't matter to folks who just enjoy shitting on professional tools)