This has an interesting interaction with another of Go's quirks. As I read this (and it seems like the author has an axe to grind so maybe they aren't explaini

This has an interesting interaction with another of Go's quirks. As I read this (and it seems like the author has an axe to grind so maybe they aren't explaining the motivation correctly) the idea is that when you want to rename A to B, you can make an A -> B alias to ease the transition. However, people calling your code and using A won't know that they need to update their code unless there's some kind of warning. But Go doesn't have compiler warnings. So I think the author is right, this would be better implemented as a compiler error plus an automatic refactoring tool. That approach would leverage one of Go's strengths -- it's a pretty regular language and already has good refactoring tools.