The younger generations of coders are indeed more susceptible to hype, but if you go around dismissing things that are hyped, you're going to miss out on a lot of good things. I've got 15+ years of Java experience, and I think Go is a nice language and has some real strengths. From what I can see, the primary difference with Java isn't the build system or the binaries, it's the decision to strongly favor simplicity and readability over expressiveness. The payoff for this is that you can jump into any Go codebase and figure out what's going on fairly quickly. You don't need to pull down the source, fire up an IDE and start drawing object diagrams, you can figure out what it's doing by skimming the source on Github. I find this very useful.