Some people think we can't learn software design with Go as it has no classes, no inheritance, no method overloading, etc But software design is about how we organize code, manage dependencies, and keep a change in one part from breaking another. E.g., encapsulation, it means controlling how other code can read or change our data. - In Java, we can use classes and private fields. - In Go, we can use packages and unexported names. Of course, they don't work the same way, but both let us choose what other code can access and what we want to keep inside our package or class. Polymorphism means the code can work with different implementations through an interface. Both Java and Go have interfaces but types in Go don't need a shared parent class, if they have the required methods, they satisfy the interface. DI or dependency injection is when we give a component what it needs instead of making it create that dependency itself. Like we can pass a database connection to a service when we create it. If the service accepts an interface, a test can pass a test implementation and we can do this with function parameters, I guess most of us have probably done it without knowing it was called dependency injection. Memory management is a separate (but interesting) topic. Go and Java use garbage collection, so we do not need to free heap objects ourselves. But we still need to understand how much memory our code uses, what happens when code shares data, and how keeping a reference to an object can stop the garbage collector from freeing it. Knowing syntax means we know how to write valid code. But more important is understanding the concept. I mean can we explain what practical problem it solves and when to use it? If we can solve the same problem in 2 different ways, which one is better and why? Actually starting with a complex, feature-rich language can be a good choice. Experience can't be taught, sometimes we need to spend time with that complexity before we can appreciate how simple the next language can be.