Well, I like Go, and it certainly has its use cases. But I personally worked on a hard-realtime safety critical mission Java project (if the program gave the wrong answer people could die, and if it gave the right answer late, tens of millions of dollars would be lost). We couldn't have done that without Java's concurrent data-structures (which Go doesn't have), without Real-Time Java's hard realtime guarantees, and it would have been very cumbersome without Java's brand of dynamic linking.
So sometimes Go is good enough, but sometimes you need the full power of the JVM.
They built Limbo just about the time Java got out. Limbo is a predecessor of Go and it's by far the language Go is closest to. Unfortunately Limbo (and Inferno) didn't have the success they hoped. It's really a shame.
That is the part of the problem as per original article, isn't it?
With all seriousness... I would like to agree with your statement. But I can't shake that nasty feeling of the "to save this village we have to burn it" undertone from your statement.
Edit: JavaScript got created without major influence of Java (it had more impact on marketing of JS than the language itself). Also I firmly believe that there was a lot of criticism of the then newly baked Java language that turned out to be prescient and to the point e.g.:[1]. Thus I would argue that as much as existence of Java has boosted development of virtual machines and compiler technology it has impeded development of language syntax and semantics.
Erlang is waaay older than Java, so are Python and Ruby. Smalltalk was the real game changer, Java not so much.
With regards to JWZ article. It is interesting how perspectives are changing in time. JWZ wrote:
" - Java-the-language is, overall, a very good thing, and works well.
- Java-the-class-library is mostly passable.
- Java-the-virtual-machine is an interesting research project, a nice proof of concept, and is basically usable for a certain class of problems (those problems where speed isn't all that important: basically, those tasks where you could get away with using Perl instead of C.)
- Java-the-security-model is another interesting research project, but it only barely works right now. In a few years, maybe they'll have it figured out or replaced."
Years later it seems that both Java security model and JVM were actually good ideas, while the language itself is considered as too rigid and too verbose.
At the same I would like to say that I am sorry that Joe Armstrong didn't design Java instead of James Gosling.
I am also extremely sorry that Rob Pike, Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer didn't get around to building Golang before there was Java...