This gist of what you said was correct, but you made a few technical errors. First of all, Go's strings are also immutable. To get around this, you can use the

This gist of what you said was correct, but you made a few technical errors. First of all, Go's strings are also immutable. To get around this, you can use the []byte type, as you said, but Go is built with the assumption that all text is UTF-8. Frankly, I find the suggestion that ASCII is good enough, even for Americans, absurd. Second, Python's "list" type and Go's slice type (what you're calling a "true array") are almost the same under the hood. Both are variable length arrays. (I'm not sure why Python calls it a "list" since it's not a linked list.) The only major difference is that Python's lists are always filled with pointers to the underlying objects. In Go, you have the choice of whether you want to use pointers to the underlying objects or to put the objects into a contiguous block of memory. Speaking more broadly, there's no reason you couldn't use a lot of different Go practices in Python and end up with much more efficient Python code: pre-allocating lists of the proper size, for example, or making sure to use mutable buffers instead of immutable str objects. However, Go makes it natural to be concerned with these efficiencies, and Python makes it natural to ignore them. Each language has its strengths.