> Rust, still doesn't have anything that matches Swing, JavaFX
There is GTK with gtk-rs, which surpasses Swing/JavaFX in many technical aspects and also has orders of magnitude higher popularity and bigger community.
Pascal, took almost 50 years until "it" got declare-variables-anywhere feature, in Embarcadero Delphi 10.3.
Java, does it still require you to make up a class for things that are completely unrelated to classes / objects? Does it still require you to put each public class in a separate file?
Go had declare-variables-anywhere from the start AFAIK (today, it's not usually considered a "feature" anymore). Delphi 10.3 came out November 2018. I don't know Pascal ecosystems very well but worked with Embarcadero Delphi (probably _the_ major Pascal-derived ecosystem), I believe it was version 10.1, on a job in 2018, and it wasn't possible to declare variables anywhere. I consider this to be a huge annoyance, and indeed also a correctness problem because there is a larger chance that variables are used before initialization.
> grammar + semantics are hardly a sales pitch
That's why many don't care all that much about generics.
> Java is an OOP language, maybe that isn't modern for you
"Modern" is not that interesting in itself. Familiarity and ergonomics towards what you're doing is more important. "Missing" features is often an advantage. Newer is not always better, certainly not in all dimensions or application domains.
I only used Pascal as one example for where enumerations appeared, if it makes you happy I can use ML from 1973 and be done with how "modern" Go happens to be.
Glad that at least it managed to get inspired by CLU model of generics from 1975.
There you go, enumerations, parametric types, structural typing, generics, garbage collection, modules, fast compilation to native code, REPL, checked errors, all about 50 years ago.
I’m the biggest python fan in the world, and you’re out of your mind if you think it can compete with Java for enterprise programming or even embedded programming for that matter. Not to mention the JVM underlying it, likely the second or third most sophisticated software project in the world.
In ten years, maybe Go. Long, LONG way to go in adoptability to push against Java shops.