Having built an offline-capable distributed database in go, I noticed that even "larger" projects in go tend to be a lot less source code than building something similar in Java.

And maybe that's just my personal style, but to me defer is much more important than generics.

I can't even remember how often I've had to debug Java bugs where someone forgot to close a ResultSet for an SQL query... And then you leak memory so badly that restarting tomcat with a daily cron is still not enough :(

With defer, you can expect people to write the cleanup code immediately after opening something, which makes it much easier to confirm that you're not leaking resources.