True, and there is also Crystal which is - in a few aspects - better than Go even, and has way more pleasant aesthetics.

The way the JVM didn't take off doesn't surprise me because Sun and Oracle have bodged it so bad, and because there were legitimate issues using the JVM when your project was small. I can't shake the feeling that to this day, even the coveted JetBrains products still fill like Swing. Indents are ugly, widgets are ugly, window refresh takes 3-4 refresh frames instead of 0, font rendering is just-not-quite-good-enough... and that does stick.

Also, the Java community was not necessarily receptive to progress - mostly because so much stuff depends on it (including very highly paid, senior carreers). They mostly went "The JVM is great for developing your own toy language, go have at it" but it would always be the-actual-Java interop. For example, my adventures with Clojure ended very abruptly because I simply do not know Java well enough to feel comfortable when I get a NullPointerException.

Which I obviously did get on my second line of REPL input.