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Overall I am happy with Go, as it lets me get stuff done quickly. The worst aspect of Go for me, is the documentation. Specifically, whoever designed the curren

Overall I am happy with Go, as it lets me get stuff done quickly. The worst aspect of Go for me, is the documentation. Specifically, whoever designed the current site: https://pkg.go.dev/io https://pkg.go.dev/io I hate the fixed top bar. I hate the fixed side bar. I hate that the page does a backflip any time you resize your window. Its unfortunate, as the site was fine, and they broke it for no reason. As a workaround, I have been using this alternate site: https://godocs.io/io https://godocs.io/io

jerf 5y ago
You can also still run godoc locally. It's deprecated but they at least upgraded it to work with generics. It still does a couple of things better locally than the replacement does, which can also be run locally. godoc provides an index of all your packages within a project, which can be helpful rather than having to remember what it's called (browser find is very helpful), and if you change the godoc for a given package, godoc updates upon refresh whereas pkgsite either requires a restart or the passage of some timeout I've never waited for. There is also certainly something to be said for godoc producing just... a page. No expand/collapse type hierarchy, nothing that interferes with browser find, nothing that breaks your spatial intuition about where things are. Just a page.
throwaway894345 5y ago
At least they got rid of the BLM advert (or I’m not seeing it on mobile anyway). EDIT: Looks like they quietly pulled the banner back in November https://github.com/golang/website/commit/8a86c4a6dbe5e8bdf59f9d68538cf0fc5852be5a https://github.com/golang/website/commit/8a86c4a6dbe5e8bdf59... EDIT: People are downvoting this, so presumably I’ve offended someone. For what it’s worth, my grievance isn’t that I disagree with the advertised politics (although I emphatically do) as much as I disagree with advertising any politics on programming language websites.
- blaxis 5y ago
  surprised they didn't have a 'support ukraine' banner
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    In their defense, they didn’t post a banner for every cause du jour, it was just the BLM banner. It could have been much more toxic. Also, I see that they did quietly pull the banner back in November: https://github.com/golang/website/commit/8a86c4a6dbe5e8bdf59f9d68538cf0fc5852be5a https://github.com/golang/website/commit/8a86c4a6dbe5e8bdf59...
- ngngngng 5y ago
  Great opportunity for a "current thing" banner service. Pop some javascript in your site and we'll add a banner to the top of any page for whatever you should be supporting at the moment.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    I mentioned this in the sibling thread, but (to their credit) the Go maintainers didn’t post banners for the current thing, it was just BLM.
  - klabb3 5y ago
    This is an excellent idea, both ironically and unironically, depending on where you stand. Of course we'll have geo targeting to cater to a global user base and not stir up any unnecessary feelings. Kinda like when Bethesda put rainbows on their Western Twitter accounts but not their ME+Russia accounts.
- philosopher1234 5y ago
  > although I emphatically do As someone who's gained a lot of clarity from what you've written on HN in the past, I was saddened to read this. Could you explain more about what your disagreement is?
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    > As someone who's gained a lot of clarity from what you've written on HN in the past Flattering that you can even identify my handle (I don't even have it committed to memory). > Could you explain more about what your disagreement is? Sure. 1. The BLM organization (that the banner was asking people to donate to) seems shady. Leaders lead lavish lives (alliteration not intended) while it's unclear how these funds are actually benefiting the people they purport to advocate for. 2. The BLM movement is predicated on a false narrative: racist police are disproportionately killing black people. This is only true if you fail to account for obvious factors like crime rates and rates of police interaction. This is all propped up by cherry-picked and often highly-editorialized examples. America does have a problem with police killings, but it doesn't appear to be racist contra the BLM narrative, and 90+% of Americans already support police reform. 3. The BLM movement appears to have done far more damage than it has saved (and I'm not even talking about property damage). The BLM movement succeeded in pressuring police departments to minimize killings of black people, but the anti-police pressure is also very likely a primary driver in the violent crime surge which has resulted in an enormous net loss of both black lives and American lives more generally. 4. The ideologies that shroud the movement (which are variously called "critical race theory" or "wokeness" or "antiracism" or etc) reject what we might call "colorblind egalitarianism" in favor of "race consciousness" which invariably results in the reification of race. E.g., a translator is fired because he's white and the author he was to translate is black, or a white man is prohibited from volunteering on a board because there's already a white woman. Or the various strictures about who is allowed to open an Asian restaurant, host a geisha party, wear a Chinese-inspired prom dress, etc. Or the various associations of math, objectivity, literature, etc with "whiteness" or "white supremacy". I can go on and on. Of course, I this sort of "BLM racism" has also "legitimized" and animated right-wing racism, so I think we see a rise in racism on both sides of the aisle. I'm passionate about a post-racist world, and I think we're a lot worse off as a result of BLM and adjacent ideologies than we were 10 years ago. Obviously I would support these points better if it were a longform post, but this is already very long for HN. Also, this is pretty terse (for sake of brevity), but I don't mean this to come across as combative. I'm happy to talk more about this, although given the controversial nature I'm not sure if this is the appropriate forum. :/
ratrocket 5y ago
I share your opinion of the new official doc site, and also use https://godocs.io https://godocs.io when I need online docs for something. But as another alternative, a sibling comment mentions running the docs locally, which is my main way to access the docs now. For anyone else wanting to try it: > godoc -http 127.0.0.1:6060 -play (the "-play" makes the examples runnable) Works like a charm!
- svnpenn 5y ago
  godoc is not a built-in command, even for Go users. So your comment is not especially useful.
  - jerf 5y ago
    go install https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/tools/cmd/godoc
    - svnpenn 5y ago
      thats not a valid URL, in the context of "go install"
      - jerf 5y ago
        Yeah, good point. Still, it's not a hard install.
  - ratrocket 5y ago
    Apologies for forgetting that `godoc` isn't built in (and looks like jerf has fixed you up). I'd argue about what's "not especially useful", but "reasonable people will disagree", as they say!
endorphine 5y ago
That would be my only gripe as well - the old docs site was 10 times better.

jerf 5y ago

You can also still run godoc locally. It's deprecated but they at least upgraded it to work with generics. It still does a couple of things better locally than the replacement does, which can also be run locally. godoc provides an index of all your packages within a project, which can be helpful rather than having to remember what it's called (browser find is very helpful), and if you change the godoc for a given package, godoc updates upon refresh whereas pkgsite either requires a restart or the passage of some timeout I've never waited for. There is also certainly something to be said for godoc producing just... a page. No expand/collapse type hierarchy, nothing that interferes with browser find, nothing that breaks your spatial intuition about where things are. Just a page.

throwaway894345 5y ago

At least they got rid of the BLM advert (or I’m not seeing it on mobile anyway). EDIT: Looks like they quietly pulled the banner back in November https://github.com/golang/website/commit/8a86c4a6dbe5e8bdf59f9d68538cf0fc5852be5a https://github.com/golang/website/commit/8a86c4a6dbe5e8bdf59... EDIT: People are downvoting this, so presumably I’ve offended someone. For what it’s worth, my grievance isn’t that I disagree with the advertised politics (although I emphatically do) as much as I disagree with advertising any politics on programming language websites.

blaxis 5y ago
surprised they didn't have a 'support ukraine' banner
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  In their defense, they didn’t post a banner for every cause du jour, it was just the BLM banner. It could have been much more toxic. Also, I see that they did quietly pull the banner back in November: https://github.com/golang/website/commit/8a86c4a6dbe5e8bdf59f9d68538cf0fc5852be5a https://github.com/golang/website/commit/8a86c4a6dbe5e8bdf59...
ngngngng 5y ago
Great opportunity for a "current thing" banner service. Pop some javascript in your site and we'll add a banner to the top of any page for whatever you should be supporting at the moment.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I mentioned this in the sibling thread, but (to their credit) the Go maintainers didn’t post banners for the current thing, it was just BLM.
- klabb3 5y ago
  This is an excellent idea, both ironically and unironically, depending on where you stand. Of course we'll have geo targeting to cater to a global user base and not stir up any unnecessary feelings. Kinda like when Bethesda put rainbows on their Western Twitter accounts but not their ME+Russia accounts.
philosopher1234 5y ago
> although I emphatically do As someone who's gained a lot of clarity from what you've written on HN in the past, I was saddened to read this. Could you explain more about what your disagreement is?
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  > As someone who's gained a lot of clarity from what you've written on HN in the past Flattering that you can even identify my handle (I don't even have it committed to memory). > Could you explain more about what your disagreement is? Sure. 1. The BLM organization (that the banner was asking people to donate to) seems shady. Leaders lead lavish lives (alliteration not intended) while it's unclear how these funds are actually benefiting the people they purport to advocate for. 2. The BLM movement is predicated on a false narrative: racist police are disproportionately killing black people. This is only true if you fail to account for obvious factors like crime rates and rates of police interaction. This is all propped up by cherry-picked and often highly-editorialized examples. America does have a problem with police killings, but it doesn't appear to be racist contra the BLM narrative, and 90+% of Americans already support police reform. 3. The BLM movement appears to have done far more damage than it has saved (and I'm not even talking about property damage). The BLM movement succeeded in pressuring police departments to minimize killings of black people, but the anti-police pressure is also very likely a primary driver in the violent crime surge which has resulted in an enormous net loss of both black lives and American lives more generally. 4. The ideologies that shroud the movement (which are variously called "critical race theory" or "wokeness" or "antiracism" or etc) reject what we might call "colorblind egalitarianism" in favor of "race consciousness" which invariably results in the reification of race. E.g., a translator is fired because he's white and the author he was to translate is black, or a white man is prohibited from volunteering on a board because there's already a white woman. Or the various strictures about who is allowed to open an Asian restaurant, host a geisha party, wear a Chinese-inspired prom dress, etc. Or the various associations of math, objectivity, literature, etc with "whiteness" or "white supremacy". I can go on and on. Of course, I this sort of "BLM racism" has also "legitimized" and animated right-wing racism, so I think we see a rise in racism on both sides of the aisle. I'm passionate about a post-racist world, and I think we're a lot worse off as a result of BLM and adjacent ideologies than we were 10 years ago. Obviously I would support these points better if it were a longform post, but this is already very long for HN. Also, this is pretty terse (for sake of brevity), but I don't mean this to come across as combative. I'm happy to talk more about this, although given the controversial nature I'm not sure if this is the appropriate forum. :/

ratrocket 5y ago

I share your opinion of the new official doc site, and also use https://godocs.io https://godocs.io when I need online docs for something. But as another alternative, a sibling comment mentions running the docs locally, which is my main way to access the docs now. For anyone else wanting to try it: > godoc -http 127.0.0.1:6060 -play (the "-play" makes the examples runnable) Works like a charm!

svnpenn 5y ago
godoc is not a built-in command, even for Go users. So your comment is not especially useful.
- jerf 5y ago
  go install https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/tools/cmd/godoc
  - svnpenn 5y ago
    thats not a valid URL, in the context of "go install"
    - jerf 5y ago
      Yeah, good point. Still, it's not a hard install.
- ratrocket 5y ago
  Apologies for forgetting that `godoc` isn't built in (and looks like jerf has fixed you up). I'd argue about what's "not especially useful", but "reasonable people will disagree", as they say!

endorphine 5y ago

That would be my only gripe as well - the old docs site was 10 times better.