Yeah I'm fairly new to Go, but have done plenty of work in languages with "no pointers" (Python, Java), with pointers (Objective-C), and with "reference/value types" (Swift). I thought I was pretty proficient with all of this, but Go's implementation was really unergonomic. It feels like it's trying to be C, but treating it more like Swift has been more effective I've found. How this all interacts with nils and missing fields in structs is also not very ergonomic, and it feels like the language is obviously missing an optional type, yet I've not seen one used commonly yet.