Personally, I would have gone with Kotlin for a translation like this. It's a closer match to Python than Go, and I think his rule swarm [1] approach to semi-automated translation would have been effective. But then, he might not have liked the fact that, like Python 3 and unlike Go, the Java platform treats strings (particularly filenames) as a sequence of Unicode code points rather than bytes.
[1]: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8153