Go is constantly being improved and refined compared to Java 1.44, there is a strong community of third party packages, you aren't shoehorned into the OOP box by basic language design, you get green threads in the form of goroutines while in Java land you are dealing with native threads & the issues they involve (curiously just learned Java <1.3 actually did use green threads, I suppose they were a casualty in the efforts to improve performance), the Go stdlib is much leaner but simultaneously much more useful compared to the Java 1.44 equivalent (even latest Java stdlib is missing basics like JSON!), date/time handling is sane compared to pre-Java 8 equivalent, etc. etc.