It's not just sorting, it's any parametric polymorphism: generic operations or non-built-in containers (not just in the sense of "array", an atomic ref is also a container) for instance. Go only lets do these in verbose, clunky ways, and losing much of the type safety Go is supposed to provide (what with being a statically typed language)

> no-one's trying to claim that the shortest code wins.

No one is indeed, so that's an irrelevant strawman.