What qualifies a language as "pretty basic" and why is that a bad or a good thing?
And while at it, offering less features as Algol used to have.
It happens all the time.
Language gets introduced at the sound of simplicity trumpet, tons of boilerplate libraries eventually appear, then if the language manages to make it in the mainstream, half baked features get introduced 'cause backwards compatibility.
Java was once like Go, and ironically DisVM also had support for Java, back in those days.
And adding half baked features to keep relevant while avoiding a Python 3, which any language that wants to survive in the market has to do, as not everyone can afford to alienate their user base.
If anything, Java complexity is the Ghost of Christmas yet to come of Go's future.
By the way, it’s fine that Java takes a different philosophy on simplicity; Go’s trade offs won’t suit every use case. But I think Go’s tradeoffs are better for more use cases by a pretty wide margin.
If Go's wants to stay relevant it will eventually grow such features, no matter what.
Even C now has such niceties like _Bool and _Complex, because adding them was not considered relevant, let alone the bags of money that have been spent trying to retrofit security solutions while keeping backwards compatibility with the "C Spirit".
Oh and even if it is quite limited, modern C also has _Generic.
Go is outstanding for the latter.