The go spec today is ~130 pages [0]. Like golang’s Stalin, its spec remarkably approachable. The latest Java spec is ~800 [1], also very accessible, but clearly there’s more complexity there.

You have to admit, there’s something appealing about being able to read the entire spec for a popular, performant, production language over a lunch break. You don’t need to read and/or master a language’s specification in order to use it. But at 130 pages, you can.

[0] https://go.dev/ref/spec [1] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se23/jls23.pdf