On Friday, August 31, 2018 at 12:06:44 AM UTC-4, Nigel Tao wrote: I'm only guessing, but I think Ian's "which docs did you look at" was referring to your previous "I was unable to extract this enlightenment from the documentation, despite sweating over it pretty hard"
Well, that could be. I grovelled through a lot of the official Go documentation, also third-party stuff I found with search engines. And yes, it did include reading "The Laws of Reflection". Which didn't enlighten me, but did adequately prepare me for the short explanation upthread that did, so there's that. It's difficult for me to be specific about how much coverage I achieved, because "the documentation", outside of the library pages, is kind of a poorly organized blob. Many individual parts are excellent, but it is difficult to know where to find things until one is already familiar enough with the territory that finding things has fallen down one's list of concerns. There's also a pervasive problem with the style. The Go documentation is insular and hieratic. It tends to explain things very well if you already inhabit the mindset of a Go programmer, but to not be very good at providing an entry into that mindset to people who do not already inhabit it. I've seen this movie before, it's a common problem in complex software with documentation written by its developers from the inside out. For me personally this is a relatively minor problem - not my first rodeo of this kind nor even my dozenth, I have broad experience and know how to adapt and persist. For most newbies it's going to be a serious blocker. I can recommend a fix: the team could hire a tech writer with an outside-in view (and no prior knowledge of Go) to do a serious editing pass on the documentation. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
