The problem with the Java way, as I see it, is that it puts more of a burden on the programmer to the point where a majority simply won't do it. Getting programmers to document their code is an uphill battle to begin with. But the bureaucracy that Java(doc) imposes makes it even harder to win in all but the most elite institutions. What I see a lot, is IDE-generated documentation which can be automatically inferred from the code, and is therefore redundant. While it superficially looks like documentation, it really is just line noise. I would agree that Java documentation at its best can be better than Go documentation. But I suspect that the average Go codebase is better documented than the average Java codebase.