> In the short term Go may be stealing from Python and Node, but in the long term

Go is a niche language.As a niche language it will perform well in its niche, but it will never be as big as Java or C#. Go total lack of expressiveness makes it unfit for a wide range of applications.

Java is rigid, but I think version 8 makes it more enjoyable. But it will not make all the terrible java core apis and framework go away.They are still here.

> I think the case can be made that Java was too simple. It's inability to express very much within itself is what led to explosion of external tools to make it "better", or indeed, "work".

Yes, Java (IIRC) originally aspired to be a small, simple language with a few and honest constructs that everyone would understand and use. Of course—speaking of CL!—this is Greenspun's Tenth Law at work. To be fair, that's not necessarily to say that blowing the syntactic budget on a for construct is a good decision, and there are very good reasons to let language design take place in a marketplace of extensions rather than in a centrally-mandated core language. But if the idea is that if you mandate a simple language then the language as people use it will necessarily be simple and uniform, then no.

(Doing my crazy-man turn for moment: this is just one manifestation of a much wider problem. The idea that pushing unavoidable but unwelcome complexity (or unreliability or untrustworthiness, or things like only-partial support for interfaces) in-band is equivalent to making it somehow go away is the great all-pervading madness that afflicts computing. "As simple as possible, but no simpler"...)

I've said Java's model of abstraction is both incomplete and insufficient; it's very frustrating.

It was definitely designed for the lowest common denominator.