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Comment by xiaq | Hacker News Reader

I like the fact that many people consider "reading source code" a way to get Go answers. Go code, the standard library in particular, is really readable.

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This is absolutely true, the standard library is very easy to read and this makes using Go very pleasant. When you compare this with C and the libc, the contrast is striking.

C? Try comparing it with Scala.

At least complicated Scala code is very in-your-face about how complicated it is, as opposed to C.

The types also make it hard to change one small thing and make everything go wrong. Sure, the standard library source looks like a trainwreck, but it has structural strength. And it's easy to use.

I read go's stdlib implementation more than any other language I have ever worked with. The main reason? Because the implementation is just a click away when you are looking at godoc.

Or just `cd /usr/lib/go/src`.

That could be a reflection on the rather thin documentation around the standard library.

You can make a lot of critiques of the standard library documentation, but "rather thin" is certainly not among them. I don't think there's a more deeply-documented stdlib besides maybe Python.

I've been playing around with http for the last few days and I've had to Google quite a few things that I would have expected to be in the docs.

Can you give some examples?

I also switched from SO to reading source in GitHub for my JS problems.

Life became less ambiguous

I feel like whenever I'm forced to dig into my node_modules folder I come out with a greater understanding (and a headache or two for my troubles).

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