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I was just using "weak" in the ordinary English sense, as in "not powerful". But you're right, that's confusing because of existing terminology. I should have said that Go has a less expressive type system, i.e. the expressivity of its type system is weak. It has no sum types, no algebraic data types, no real pattern matching, and limited generic constraints. And of course if we compare it to much more expressive type systems, which is a bit unfair because none of them are mainstream, it has no higher-kinded types, no dependent types, and no refinement types. As for "true" weak typing, the idiomatic use of `any` (`interface{}`) in Go comes pretty close. While languages with more expressive type systems will often have some way to express that general concept, it's typically more constrained, more friendly to static checks, and less unsafe, because of the some of the other properties I mentioned, such as pattern matching where the compiler will warn you if you're not properly checking a value before unsafely accessing it. The reason for my comment about Python and PHP is because to me, programming in Go feels little different in programming in those languages along with one of the bolted-on static checkers they have - you don't get anywhere close to the same level of static guarantee of correctness of programs. It's difficult to implement Yaron Minsky's adage "make invalid states unrepresentable" in Go's type system, and that's unfortunate. |