Go is a reasonably performant language that makes it pretty straightforward to write reliable, highly concurrent services that don't rely on heavy multithreading - all thanks to the goroutine model.
There really was no other reasonably popular, static, compiled language around when Google came out.
And there still barely is - the only real competitor that sits in a similar space is Java with the new virtual threads.
Languages with async/await promise something similar, but in practice are burdened with a lot of complexity (avoiding blocking in async tasks, function colouring, ...)
I'm not counting Erlang here, because it is a very different type of language...
So I'd say Go is popular despite the myriad of shortcomings, thanks to goroutines and the Google project street cred.
For ML/data: python
For backend/general purpose software: Java
The only silver bullet we know of is building on existing libraries. These are also non-accidentally the top 3 most popular languages according to any ranking worthy of consideration.
----- https://openjdk.org/jeps/512 -----
First, we allow main methods to omit the infamous boilerplate of public static void main(String[] args), which simplifies the Hello, World! program to:
class HelloWorld {
void main() {
System.out.println("Hello, World!");
}
}
Second, we introduce a compact form of source file that lets developers get straight to the code, without a superfluous class declaration: void main() {
System.out.println("Hello, World!");
}
Third, we add a new class in the java.lang package that provides basic line-oriented I/O methods for beginners, thereby replacing the mysterious System.out.println with a simpler form: void main() {
IO.println("Hello, World!");
}edit: hold on wait, java doesn't have Value types yet... /jk