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Comment by zeebeee | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea how to evaluate this, or even tell what it is. Could someone help me out?

I see that it's a bunch of packages, under the heading of "Facebook Go". I assume this is something related to Google's Golang?

I click on "tool" ("Go library that wraps the go tool"). This has a README that points to a documentation link. And that documentation says things like, "Build the Command and return the path to the binary."

So, I guess we're talking about some kind of compiler here? A Golang compiler? How to I get it, how do I use it, and what -- if anything -- does this whole mess have to do with Facebook?

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The name of the language is Go, not Golang. This is a collection of tools and libraries for Go that Facebook has developed. I don't see any compiler, though one of them wraps the Go tool that is used to compile Go programs.

I've been working with go for the past year, and let me tell you - golang is king when it comes to google's own search engine queries.

You're right it's not the proper name that the go language team at google assigned, but it's certainly the colloquial (and notably more unique) one.

I don't see that it is the colloquial name of the language even if people sometimes search for it. In conversation, AFAIK it tends to be called Go. For example, look through the golang-nuts mailing list and count how many people say "Go" versus "Golang" when not referring to the website or mailing list.

Have you tried debugging something and search for for "go" rather than "golang"? You're both correct here: the name of the language is Go, and when searching google for help with an error or something, it's best to search for golang rather than go, or you'll be wading through a bunch of unrelated pages.

Thanks!

> This is a collection of tools and libraries for Go that Facebook has developed.

How did you figure that out? (And thus, in the future, how can I figure it out?)

Well, I think the primary difference is that I'm a little more familiar with Go, so I have slightly more context. Most of these say things like "Package that provides such-and-such functions" or "Library for doing this thing".

The crappy documentation is very much in line with many Go libraries, sadly. There doesn't seem to be a great culture of documentation. People often just write bare API docs without explaining why the library is useful or showing a lot of examples.

It may be a cultural difference of system programmers (including Go designers and developers) and (consumer) application programmers (e.g., as in the Apple camp). System programmers regard themselves higher, prefer terse symbol names, specs, docs, mathematical expressions, and formal methods, don't seem fans of Objective C or Java style readability and verbosity. But then again, it's open source software -- No one owes anyone anything.

> formal methods

Go and formal methods? Seriously? It's one of those things that I imagine the Go community rejecting as being academic and not about getting stuff done.

^ that's not a value judgement, btw. I have no experience with applying formal methods myself.

Never experienced this, godoc https://godoc.org/ is a good resource

I was complaining about exactly the docs I've found on godoc.org.

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