I've been thinking a lot about language design and what elements would be necessary for an ideal programming language, and studying Google's Go has led me to question a lot of otherwise common knowledge.Specifically, Go seems to have all of the interesting benefits from object oriented programming without actually having any of the structure of an object oriented language. There are no classes, only structures; there is no class/structure inheritance -- only structure embedding. There aren't any hierarchies, no parent classes, no explicit interface implementations. Instead, type casting rules are based on a loose system similar to duck-typing, such that if a struct implements the necessary elements of a Reader or a Request or an Encoding, then you can cast it and use it as one.Is there something about OOP as implemented in C++ and Java and C# that is inherently more capable, more maintainable, somehow more powerful that you have to give up when moving to a language like Go? What benefit do you have to give up to gain the simplicity that this new paradigm represents?EDITRemoved the obsolete question that readers seemed to get excessively hung up on and infuriated by.The question is, what does the traditional object oriented paradigm (with hierarchies and such) as frequently seen in common language implementations have to offer that can't be done as easily in this simpler model? Or, in other words, if you were to design a language today, is there a reason you would want to include the concept of class hierarchies?
Benefits of classic OOP over Go-like language
programming languages;object oriented;language design;go