Anyone been to godocs1/31/2024 ![]() Driven perhaps by the fact developers can’t hide embarrassing, incomplete and outdated API docs behind a tiny link hidden in a CSS dropdown in some far-flung corner of their project webpage any more - Go puts it front and centre whether you like it or not. The fact that GoDoc (and the equally terrific GoWalker) make access to docs so easy has had an overall positive effect on the Go ecosystem too - it seems the vast majority of libraries have some documentation, and a rising percentage have excellent documentation. Unfortunately, there is also a negative impact - I can hardly bear to look at Java 8 or Python 3 documentation over Go any more. I’ve become a bit addicted, searching daily for new or interesting libraries to play with, simply because it’s so accessible to find what I want on there. Being able to find libraries and read their documentation with absolutely no pain? Sold. Sounds simple - but it’s turned out to be quite a game changer. It also doubles as a search engine, saving Go developers from having to dive back in to SourceForge-infested waters. GoDoc provides complete, consistent and clean documentation for every open source Go library one can find on the web. Of course, this wasn’t novel - we’ve had javadoc for years, but what came next was a bit of a revelation. Go came along and put docs generation one command away - godoc. Python and Node upped the game, but as a developer I’d rather read the docs I’m after than trying to time the circus of different tools required to generate them. The experience was always the same: a Google searchathon leading to a ghastly freakshow of project pages, inevitably filled with dead or old links to outdated libraries and unfulfilled promises of comprehensive “documentation”. ![]() I daren’t count the hours of my life I’ve spent searching for code libraries and documentation, but it’s probably a terrifying number (anyone else who has worked with Java will know what I mean). Python, Rust, even JavaScript have a number of superior features, so why do I continue to write code in Go? The thing is, I don’t think the Go language is its strongest selling point. However, the web doesn’t need another article fawning over why Go is better than language X or why it’s inferior to Z - there are plenty of those. I’ve been using Go for a while now, and really rather like it.
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