It's sad - I spent a good 12 years writing Scala every day and it was the ideal language for my brain. Until it wasn't - sbt got too complex for it's own good, everything became "very smart" developers over-using implicit conversions, you couldn't find a project that wasn't an opinion war on cats vs whatever. It collapsed on the weight of it's own smugness.

go and kotlin aren't it, gleam scratches the itch but I can't justify writing code that would impossible to hire for.

scala situation is a real shame.

Every job I've has has used different languages so I don't really understand the need to find a dev for a specific language. I went from network firmware in C to banking application servers in Scala and it took like 2 weeks to ramp up. Not a big deal. Now I write lower level networking stuff again in Go, which seems like its just worse than e.g. C-with-templates (and occasional classes) style C++ so I don't really understand why people like it.

I think it used to be common to just look for smart people and assume they can run with whatever stack. Wasn't that the point of abstract algorithm questions etc. (basically an IQ test)?

Golang is not faster than Java, the opposite in fact. With native image, Java can be used for sidecar applications as well.

Java is almost always significantly faster than Go because the Go runtime does a poor job of exploiting large memory page, doesn't support text-on-huge-pages, and barely supports profile-guided optimization. With HotSpot you get all of this and more for free. Go is fine but Java is peak.