In some ways, I consider Go to be a bit of a redo of the early ideas of Java, but with a bit more focus on tooling, and a stronger aim towards simplicity. And Go's standard library authors have the benefit of seeing how Java's early days played out.
I do enjoy that Go gives a bit more obvious control over memory layout than Java did, and I enjoy using it as a small projects language. I've never used it in full anger/production, so I haven't seen the worst of it.
One funny thing about Guice(mentioned elsewhere): I've heard more than one Googler say that dislike the framework quite a bit, due to how heavily it can be abused.
One bit of advice that seems to have gone either missing in Java/JVM, or common knowledge, is the idea that only main/binary packages should have config options via flags/env vars. Many, many JVM libraries do not follow that convention, and I've had to hunt down a log4j XML file for Spark in order to turn down the logging levels before. Would much rather have that be controlled via a flag.
Yes, flags vs. config files in Unix are a classic example of dependency injection vs. side effects, but at the process level rather than the programming language level.
At Google pretty much all server configuration is done with flags. Binaries can and do have thousands of flags. And I view that as a much better solution than a config file that is searched for.
The idea is that modular units like processes and functions don't "search for configuration", they just accept parameters, and led the higher level application configure them. Then the code becomes very straightforward to read and debug.
I do enjoy that Go gives a bit more obvious control over memory layout than Java did, and I enjoy using it as a small projects language. I've never used it in full anger/production, so I haven't seen the worst of it.
One funny thing about Guice(mentioned elsewhere): I've heard more than one Googler say that dislike the framework quite a bit, due to how heavily it can be abused.
One bit of advice that seems to have gone either missing in Java/JVM, or common knowledge, is the idea that only main/binary packages should have config options via flags/env vars. Many, many JVM libraries do not follow that convention, and I've had to hunt down a log4j XML file for Spark in order to turn down the logging levels before. Would much rather have that be controlled via a flag.