> I’ve used statically typed languages in the past, but my programming for the past few years has mostly been in Python. The experience was somewhat annoying at

> I’ve used statically typed languages in the past, but my programming for the past few years has mostly been in Python. The experience was somewhat annoying at first, it felt as though it was simply slowing me down and forcing me to be excessively explicit whereas Python would just let me do what I wanted, even if I got it wrong occasionally. Somewhat like giving instructions to someone who always stops you to ask you to clarify what you mean, versus someone who always nods along and seems to understand you, though you’re not always sure they’re absorbing everything. It will decrease the amount of type-related bugs for free, but I’ve found that I still need to spend nearly the same amount of time writing tests. This is one of the biggest confusion points when comparing Python and Go. Go's static type system is weak, the weakest of any widely-used static-typed languages except C/C++. Lack of interfaces means you have to cast in/out of object, so you're constantly sidestepping the supposed benefits of the static type system. Type errors will, of course, be caught at runtime, but that's completely identical to Python. You can, of course, use go generate to avoid a lot of the object casting, but then you get all the wonderful problems of macros. Python doesn't enforce types at compile time (because there isn't a compile time) but it does enforce types--it does not "nod and seem to understand you", if, for example you decide to do `42 + "Hello, world"`. It very much tells you that this is not valid. This confusion comes from the common misconception that static types = strong types, and dynamic types = weak types. The truth is that there are a good number of static languages (C being the most obvious) which have much weaker type-checking that some dynamic languages like Python.