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.

When did you last touch java, before 2000?

Local environments are not tied to IDEs at all, but you are doing yourself a disservice if you don't use a decent IDE irrespective of language - they are a huge productivity boost.

And are you stuck in the XML times or what? Spring Boot is insanely productive - just as a fact of matter, Go is significantly more verbose than Java, with all the unnecessary if errs.

> When did you last touch java, before 2000?

August 22, 2025.

Local environments are not literally tied to IDEs, but they effectively are in any non-trivially sized project. And the reason is because most Java shops really do believe "you are doing yourself a disservice if you don't use a decent IDE irrespective of language." I get along fine with a text editor + CLI tools in Deno, Lua, and Zig. Only when I enter Java world do the wisest of the wise say "yeah there is a CLI, but I don't really know it. I recommend you download IntelliJ and run these configs instead."

Yes Spring Boot is productive. So is Ruby on Rails or Laravel.