I tried Go for the same reasons. It looked to me like a statically typed Java, but in practice it was not the best experience. The Code is not more expressive than Java, but you lose all the good libs and tools from Java. Most annoying was the in ability to create concise mocks, because you cannot implement interfaces at runtime with Go.

I wanted to say: "it looked to me like a statically typed Python"

If you hadn't mentioned Go, you could have described Java with these bullet points (with the exception of the last). Why throw away all the proven libraries, extremely good garbage collector, IDEs, intrumentation? Java is a perfectly fine language and if you think it is too verbose, there are good other options such as Kotlin, Groovy (which offers static typing nowadays), Ceylon etc.

> Groovy (which offers static typing nowadays

Groovy's static typing is quite recent, written by one person only, and not actually used in many codebases. Neither Grails nor Gradle uses it.

There's only really 2 or 3 use cases for Groovy:

* quick & dirty scripts for Java class testing and manip

* Grails

* more recently, Gradle (which still ships with Groovy 1.x)

If you want static typing on the JVM, best use a language designed from the ground up to be staticly typed, e.g. Java, Scala, Kotlin, Ceylon.

I happen to like Go, but the excessive marketing of Go on HN as a solution to every "problem" is tiresome.

Agreed; I like a lot of what I see in Go (though admittedly I liked it about as much when I saw it before Go was released) but the hype is getting to the point where it's impossible to take the general Go advocacy on HN seriously.

I'm starting to wonder when, when I mention C++, I'm going to be told that Go will fix all my problems. (Rust might; Go won't.)

It's hard to take your comment with impartiality when 90% of your comments mention Go.

I agree with the parent that the author should investigate Go, but add that the author will get all of those benefits plus a dependency management headache.

Maybe the author needs Java Interop.

You forgot to mention go-routines. I don't think I could survive another day without hearing about how amazing they are and will completely reinvent concurrency as we know it.

People think I am pining for go too, for similar reasons. Yet I tried very hard to like go, and was unable to put up with such a primitive language just for the nice tooling. Not everything is a "you just need to use go" in disguise.