I'm reasonably confident you're assigning too much significance to what was probably an offhand remark in a particular context. I just looked at slides from a 2

I'm reasonably confident you're assigning too much significance to what was probably an offhand remark in a particular context. I just looked at slides from a 2010 talk[1] by Pike which was pretty explicit about what they were doing in this area: "It's a form of duck typing, but (usually) checkable at compile time. It's also another form of orthogonality." And this one from Russ Cox in 2010[2]: "Compiled, statically-typed languages (C, C++, Java) require too much typing and too much typing: * verbose, lots of repetition * too much focus on type hierarchy * types get in the way as much as they help * compiles take far too long" A common theme for Go from the beginning has been the balance between type safety and not getting in the way of the programmer. The analogy to duck typing has been a consistent observation throughout Go's public existence. This is incompatible with the sentiment you took from whatever talk you saw. Go's architects didn't set out to make a Java clone. It's more like Java's evil twin. [1] http://talks.golang.org/2010/ExpressivenessOfGo-2010.pdf http://talks.golang.org/2010/ExpressivenessOfGo-2010.pdf [2] http://talks.golang.org/2010/go_talk-20100112.html http://talks.golang.org/2010/go_talk-20100112.html