Saying that Python has "no pointers" is a bit of an oversimplification, somewhere between "technically true, but misleading" and "actually incorrect", depending on how you define your terms and frame the question. Remember that Java has "no pointers" too, it works basically the same way Python does (except for some minor quibbles about primitive types), except if you go to 4.3.1 of the Java SE 11 spec and look for "pointer" you'll find the flat admission that Java has pointers.

The part about pointers that makes programming hard is that you can create multiple references to the same object, and if you don't realize this, you can modify something that you didn't realize you were modifying. In Python this can happen easily enough:

    a = []
    b = a
    a.append(1)

Question: what is the value of b? You might think that this is pretty obvious, but once you can answer this question correctly, you basically understand pointers. In fact, it's not really relevant whether you say that "a" and "b" are pointers or whether you say that they are object references, conceptually, it does not matter what you call them. The fact that Golang has different syntax for pointers and the fact that you can get the address of local variables or member fields is no big deal, since understanding how pointers work is the hard part, and Python already makes you do that.

Package handling in practice I would say is a wash, more or less. Both Python and Golang have multiple different ways of managing packages, depending on your preferences.

It's flat incorrect to say that Python has generics. What Python has is dynamic typing. Golang has interface{}, which is equivalent to what Python has, except it requires casting.

Out of curiosity, is b [1]? Or if b receives a copy of a, then b would still be an empty list, i.e. []. Not sure what answer you're expecting.

interface{} is completely different, in that it doesn't allow polymorphism. In python, I can add = lambda a, b: a+b, and then call add on ints, floats, strs, or some custom type of my own. In go, I can pass an interface{} and check if its type is the same as some other type I know about. But no polymorphism.

This is factually incorrect, interface{} allows polymorphism. Maybe you are unaware of how interface{} works but if you want to call a method on it you just do this:

    func myFunc(a interface{}) {
        a.(interface{ f() }).f()
    }

This works for any type "a" which has a method "f" with the correct signature, and this is what I meant when I said “except it requires casting”. The fact that you can’t do this with + is merely a consequence of the fact that + is just the __add__ method in Python, and in Golang + is not a method. The fact that Golang matches method signatures whereas Python only matches method names is not really a substantial difference in my eyes.

I don’t think there’s a strong case to be made here that interface{} is substantially different from Any in Python, again, except for the required cast. And I think we all agree that neither Python nor Golang support generics. (Python supports metaprogramming, and you can implement something similar to generics with metaprogramming, but I don’t consider that to mean that Python supports generics. Type checkers retrofitted onto Python also support generics, but I don’t really consider those to be core Python yet.)

You don’t have to check the types, you can say “unpack these variables as into and if they aren’t into, blow up” which is what Python does as well. The major difference is that it’s implicit in Python and explicit in Go.

> no pointers

FWIW, this is one of the biggest selling points of Golang for me - I love the fact that I'm able to be explicit about reference vs. value, and that it prevents me from shooting myself in the foot when I inevitably screw it up.

It's enough of a differentiator for me that I almost can't put languages with and without pointers in the same mental bucket.