This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club.
http://gotopia.tech/bookclub
Barry Feigenbaum - Retired Sr. Principal Software Engineer & Author of "Go for Java Programmers"
Shon Saliga - IBM Storage Evangelist
Check out more here:
https://gotopia.tech/episodes/444
RESOURCES
Barry
https://www.linkedin.com/in/barryfeigenbaum
Shon
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shon-saliga-32336b2
DESCRIPTION
Dr. Barry Feigenbaum — an IBM, Amazon and Dell veteran with a PhD in Computer Engineering and decades of Java experience — spent time working with Go on microservices and liked it enough to write the book he wished had existed when he made the switch. In this GOTO Book Club episode with longtime colleague Shon Saliga, he walks through the core contrasts: Go is a compiled language that targets a narrower domain than Java — primarily command-line tools and web servers — but excels there with smaller binaries, faster startup, and dramatically lower container overhead. Concurrency is the headline difference: Go's goroutines are far lighter than Java threads, and its channel-based communication model sidesteps many of the problems that make concurrent Java code hard to reason about.
The error handling conversation is particularly illuminating. Java's exception mechanism, while powerful, encourages developers to overuse it for ordinary error reporting — Go simply doesn't allow that by design. Errors in Go are return values, not throws; panics are reserved for truly catastrophic situations. Similarly, Go's implicit interfaces (if you implement the methods, you implement the interface — no declaration required) give the language a flexibility that feels alien to Java developers at first but becomes a strength quickly. Barry's conclusion is clear: for greenfield servers and containerized microservices, Go is worth serious consideration — and for Java developers willing to reset a few mental models, the transition is more tractable than it looks.
RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Barry Feigenbaum • Go for Java Programmers • https://amzn.to/4uRL3li
Ken Christopher, Barry Feigenbaum, Shon Salig • DOS 5: The Basic • https://amzn.to/4tKDVGs
A N M Bazlur Rahman • Modern Concurrency in Java • https://amzn.to/42w8cOk
Ben Evans & Jim Gough • Optimizing Cloud Native Java • https://amzn.to/41nivD9
Ian F. Darwin • Java Cookbook 5th ed. • https://amzn.to/3QH0NZy
Victor Grazi & Jeanne Boyarsky • Real-World Java • https://amzn.to/4oCEeBR
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