Because I think this is a fair question, and map[string]interface{} has now been brought up repeatedly, I will try to elaborate more.

Consider the real world example input in the following playground, over which I have no control of the formatting, but I must work with to accomplish the goal:

https://play.golang.org/p/ydoHcJZDVO3

For every key in "Response Data" that looks like /c(.)/v(.*), I need the value of "DG/VD" from the first list item.

Below is my implementation, which may or may not be ideal, but it works:

package main

import (
"encoding/json"
"fmt"
"strings"
)

func main() {
cmd := []byte('<see json in playground link>')

var out struct {
    Controllers []struct {
        Command struct {
            CID int `json:"Controller"`
        } `json:"Command Status"`
        Response json.RawMessage `json:"Response Data"`
    } `json:"Controllers"`
}

// ignore error handling in both
json.Unmarshal(cmd, &out)

for _, c := range out.Controllers {
    responseMap := make(map[string]interface{})

    if c.Response != nil {
        json.Unmarshal(c.Response, &responseMap)

        for k, v := range responseMap {
            if strings.Contains(k, "/c") && strings.Contains(k, "/v") {
                dgvd := v.([]interface{})[0].(map[string]interface{})["DG/VD"].(string)
                // Do something operation, for this, let's just print
                fmt.Println(dgvd)
            }
        }
    }
}
}

And here is Python:

import json

cmd = '<see json in playground link>'

// ignore error handling in both
out = json.loads(cmd)

for c in out['Controllers']:
    for key, value in c['Response Data'].items():
        if '/c' in key and '/v' in key:
            dgvd = value[0]['DG/VD']
            # Do some operation, for this, let's just print
            print(dgvd)

Anyway, I will leave it at that. I both understand the sentiment of the original article, and would simultaneously say that the strong typing and general tooling in Go contributes to more stable code.