I would hesitate to call Java a better language than Go, but Java is much older so the designers of Go should have learned from Java's mistakes, which they did not.

When Java was new, though, it was certainly a far better language compared to its contemporaries than Go was when it came out in 2009.

Its exceptions (even with the not perfect checked ones) are eons better than Go’s solution. Not sure how expressive Go has gotten with generics, but Java can solve plenty of problems very elegantly with streams. Oh, and did I mention that Java is goddamn more concise than Go? But for some reason verboseness is never brought up against the latter.

That and Java still continues to be both faster moving and more innovative than Golang despite all that baggage.

3 second builds?

Yes, thanks to compile on save on IDEs.

Also Turbo Pascal, Modula-2, Delphi, VB 6 were already doing that in 1990's hardware.

Here Turbo Pascal 5.5 marketing material from 1989, 34 000 lines per minute.

https://archive.org/details/TurboPascal55

Go compile times are a reason to admire only for those that never used such compiler toolchains.

I think people are comparing Go’s compile times to the compile times of other languages that they have the option of using in the present day. Go is not the only language in history for which there exists a fast compiler, but its fast compile times are certainly salient when comparing it with a number of popular alternatives. OCaml springs to mind as a plausible alternative to Go that also has a fast compiler, but its ecosystem is vastly smaller.