From a high level programming in Go looks to me to be very like programming with Microsoft's COM. It's interface oriented, no inheritance. You could say that th

From a high level programming in Go looks to me to be very like programming with Microsoft's COM. It's interface oriented, no inheritance. You could say that this is the purest form of OO if you take Alan Kay's viewpoint that the emphasis should be on the messages and not the object. In COM you have QueryInterface and in Go you have interface matching and casting. QueryInterface or an interface cast is like a hinge between dynamic and static typing. You get great flexibility but still preserve your abstractions in that you never depend on an implementation. Of course you can do this in, say, java by using instanceof to match against an interface but the difference with COM and Go is that it is a primary mechanism and so the code written in the language tends to use this pattern a lot. i.e. It's encouraged. See this example from Russ Cox: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang- https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang- nuts/Rj5t1h_ztxI/Fgs6HfLqMHAJ