You're not crazy. I also have vague memories of maps being more obnoxious in Go. :) The facts are that map literals did change a bit in Go 1.5 (i.e. fairly rec

You're not crazy. I also have vague memories of maps being more obnoxious in Go. :) The facts are that map literals did change a bit in Go 1.5 (i.e. fairly recently), full literal specification for values could already be elided back then - it was KEYS that required full specification: https://golang.org/doc/go1.5#map_literals https://golang.org/doc/go1.5#map_literals If you go way more back, Go 1 also saved some typing on values, in case they were pointers: https://golang.org/doc/go1#literals https://golang.org/doc/go1#literals