[earthboundkid]

Python has None, which frequently caused me problems in production, so that's not different, except Go can at least tell between a string and nullable string pointer.

Reversing a string is not a basic operation. A) why would you ever need to do it in the real world? B) reversing Unicode is non-trivial due to composing characters. There are packages available for Go that implement grapheme segmentation. If you need it, you can import one.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Integer formatting requires string reversing if you don't precompute the digits or work backward in a second buffer. It becomes necessary when standard formatting routines are too heavyweight for resource constrained systems.

[klodolph]

Nearly every time I’ve had to reverse a string, it’s been for a coding interview.

[jerf]

Yeah, that's a really bad example... many environments now don't have a "string reversal" anymore, and many of the ones that do are the old & busted "string reverse" that doesn't work with Unicode, so they aren't really "string reverse" but just a legacy function that can't be removed anymore that is now technically grotesquely mislabeled. A modern-day string reverse is barely even defineable; technically, you have to pin it to a specific version of the Unicode standard to be well-defined because the next standard is likely to add characters that your string reverse would need to know about to work properly, but can't since they don't exist yet.

In some sense the best answer to "write me a string reversal function" in an interview is to say that no such function even exists anymore; I can write you a byte reversal function if you like, or we can sit down and hammer out a definition of some function I can write for you but it won't necessarily be a "string reverse". Best you can do nowadays is iterate on "graphemes as defined in this specific Unicode standard" and reverse those, but IIRC even that has some pathological edge cases, some of which are not really resolvable. Human languages as a whole are quite quirky.