Last, but certainly not least, the state of the art tooling for Java, the world class GC (and advanced ones like G1), the breadth and depth of its incredible ecosystem, the performance monitoring and extension API, the innovative Quasar library (https://github.com/puniverse/quasar) for concurrency alongside the features and additions in Java 8 pretty much make Java a serious contender for new projects.
If you haven't explored modern Java, I suggest you give it another look.
I haven't, and that's good to hear. But it's still more complicated than Go if just in regards to how you need to be aware of these tools to begin with. Where as Go's behaviour is out-of-the-box.
This is purely from a "this is my first language" angle though. So I'm not to say that the aforementioned Java tooling isn't better than Go's, and in many other ways too.
It's really not that bad -- projects like https://github.com/puniverse/capsule, Oracle's http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/208 and reference implementation of such JEP, http://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/deploy... have made Java deployment a breeze.
Last, but certainly not least, the state of the art tooling for Java, the world class GC (and advanced ones like G1), the breadth and depth of its incredible ecosystem, the performance monitoring and extension API, the innovative Quasar library (https://github.com/puniverse/quasar) for concurrency alongside the features and additions in Java 8 pretty much make Java a serious contender for new projects.
If you haven't explored modern Java, I suggest you give it another look.