It's not that there's a lot of things that you flat-out can't do, it's that you can't do those things in a type-safe manner. The type system isn't capable of re

It's not that there's a lot of things that you flat-out can't do, it's that you can't do those things in a type-safe manner. The type system isn't capable of representing what you're trying to do. This seems like an odd omission in a language that otherwise has static typing. I suspect this is why a lot of people who've jumped on the Golang bandwagon come from Python & Ruby: they're already used to no compile-time type safety, so they're not missing anything. For people who like type systems and have a style of programming that relies upon them, Go doesn't give them the tools they need to be productive. In Steve Yegge's terms: C++ is a pretty software-conservative update to C (it even has backwards-compatible syntax). Meanwhile, Go is a pretty software-liberal update (slightly to the right of Python). G simply does not support a software-conservative programming style. Consequently, Go's adoption has mostly come from software-liberal communities.