Let beginners cut their teeth on stuff like Python and Go. Rust can wait.
Java as a first language: won't like the boilerplate but won't have any point of comparison anyway, will get a few NPEs, might use threads and get data races but won't experience memory unsafety.
Go as a first language: much less boilerplate, but will still get nil panics, will be encouraged to use goroutines because every tutorial shows off how "easy" they are, will get data races with full blown memory unsafety immediately.
Rust as a first language: `None` // no examples found
I think Go as a beginner language would be better if people were discouraged from using goroutines instead of actively encouraged (the myth of "CSP solves everything"), otherwise I think it needs much better tooling to save people from walking off a cliff with their goroutines. And no, -race clearly isn't it, especially not for a beginner.
And in one respect I've found Go more of a hazard for experienced devs than beginners: the function signature of append() gives you the intuition of a functional programming append that never modifies the original slice. This has literally resulted in CVEs[1] even by experienced devs, especially combined with goroutines. Beginners won't have an intuition for this and will hopefully check the documentation instead of assuming.
[1] https://github.com/grafana/grafana/security/advisories/GHSA-...
For all of Go's faults, "just send it over a channel bro" is easy to explain for trivial cases even if it often risks deadlocks and data races. To avoid the worst risks of this kind of code, Rust makes even trivial cases a big exercise. Go has an opportunity here to become more resistant to bugs without becoming less simple, but resistance to bugs doesn't appear to be a priority even for the Go team itself (e.g. even recently https://github.com/golang/go/issues/64474 )
In comparison, Python, Go, Javascript and C# are all much easier to teach and leave students more able to make real software.
