Here is an illuminating (to me) post that shows how the Go approach to solving algorithmic problems might be different from other languages (in this case, a generic graph data type + Dijkstra's algorithm):

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang-nuts/Rj5t1h_ztx...

Sure, the final implementation still has a couple instances of interface{}, but they are much more innocuous than your example.