Something that strikes me about Go's approach here, and the explanations in many of the posts on this page, are that they're all focused on what is happening under the hood: What memory are we pointing at, what's being copied, is it a pointer etc etc.
Whereas if we start from a point of view of "What semantics and performance guarantees do we desire?", we might end up with a more coherent user-facing interface (even if internally that leads to something more complex).
Personally, my mental model is often influenced by Python - where a name is distinct from a variable, but this distinction doesn't seem to appear in many other languages.
Whereas if we start from a point of view of "What semantics and performance guarantees do we desire?", we might end up with a more coherent user-facing interface (even if internally that leads to something more complex).
Personally, my mental model is often influenced by Python - where a name is distinct from a variable, but this distinction doesn't seem to appear in many other languages.