Go is the only language where I look at the standard library source instead of google whenever I run into an ambiguity in the docs. I think there are three reasons for this.

First, the docs link to the actual line in source, so it’s just a click away and available in the exact context I need it.

Second, I know I’ll be able to understand it: there are usually very few dependencies, so I can usually get all the context I need from a single file; the source formatting is familiar; code style, like variable names, are familiar because of the cultural influence of the Tour of Go; and there is usually no magic anywhere—I know that things are exactly what they appear to be, like when I see a variable declaration, it is not secretly calling a complex function (this is vital to human knowledge and is aligned with Objectivist epistemology’s “law if identity”).

Third, every time I look at the standard library source, I become a better programmer. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve thought to myself “oh, that’s a clean way to organize this kind of code!” I often end up immediately using what I learn from the stand library source.

I agree, and if others disagree they should comment and explain why instead of downvoting you.

One of Go's major selling points (for me anyway) was a solid standard library written mostly in conventional Go style. It's a great example of how Go code should be written, and a wonderful learning tool for the language.

It also makes participating in the community easier because that's one less thing you have to learn in order to contribute.

> My guess is that gofmt is a huge factor in this

It really is. My code looks like your code and the next person's code. Go is opinionated and strict and that makes reading other people's code so much easier

Experts' code should be clearer and more concise than novices' code. If that's not true, there's no payoff for getting more proficient with the language, and it's not doing enough to help you.

golang is not primarily designed for experts

"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt." – Rob Pike

Ironic in a company that prouds itself of PhD hiring games.

This is about readability. There are many other attributes of code (idiomatic? design? efficiency?) that differentiate. But I should be able to grok anyone's code within reason.

I wish gofmt would let you set a desired line length and break it for you.. prettier has me spoiled in that regard

If a tool is going to enforce line length limits, I'd rather have it spit a warning/error than silently try to guess a good place to break the line automatically. Otherwise, an editor tool that soft-wraps long lines at the (often poorly) guessed location without touching the code would be better.

But that’s the thing about prettier - it wraps exceptionally well because it actually parses the AST. I never think about how I space my JavaScript anymore because it always does it correctly.. it’s one less thing to get in my way when I code

The number of options that prettier exposes (despite boasting about being "opinionated", i.e. disregarding the user's opinions) suggests that there are people with different aesthetics or accessibility needs who would not consider one style to be always correct.

IMHO we're about 10 years overdue for committing a canonical representation of that AST to version control instead of treating a particular serialized visualization of it as the single source of truth (and spending countless hours debating which format is "good enough" for everyone in every situation).

You can always set your defaults for your editor.

Packages extensively using reflect + interfaces together can be a bit of a pain to work through. :/

Absolutely. But those are clear code smells. Any org with competent code review would flag them and kill them before they proliferated.

Would you consider k8s to be developed by a competent org? They have 2324 func declarations that take or return an interface{} on master right now.

Kubernetes, like Docker, is notoriously bad Go. The authors essentially transliterated Java.

This. It was really hard to enforce supplementary style across my team to match common conservatism in popular codebases (e.g. only return a single value or a value and bool/error. Don’t expose channels in APIs) when K8s so blatantly fails them.

Have you seen the internals of the Go http library? :)

Have you seen the internals of the rand library? HTTP uses interfaces cleverly to detect optional interfaces. Today I found out that rand.Rand does a type check on every core method to see if it’s source is the hidden type for global methods.