Introducing Go by Example (opens in new tab)

Very cool. Maybe Go will win some people back to the strongly typed language realm. Having the compiler acts as a safety net is pretty awesome. Much better than having your code blow up at run time with dynamic languages.

This is an old media presentation of something inherently interactive -- Alan Kay complains about how the wikipedia pages' code examples aren't executable. There is already the well-developed http://tour.golang.org/, which can be used freely.

I really like the way this is set up with lengthy examples next to the explanatory text. I look forward to reading through it. Thanks!

In the meantime, mind a quick comment on the typography? The Palatino Linotype body text renders poorly on Windows. Italics are particularly hard to read.

I tried changing it to Georgia and it made a world of difference:

http://mg.to/images/go-by-example-palatino.png

http://mg.to/images/go-by-example-georgia.png

Quick Go question. I haven't done much go coding at all, but play around with the language. I've been reading a lot about it (thanks to HN). So I was now looking at the Slices section and noticed a slice being initalize as:

t := []int{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}

What makes that a slice and not an array?

EDIT: Ok, found that answer on google go's blog. Apparently leaving out the length makes it one.

I've never experimented with go, until now. I just ran all of the examples (found the mt=>fmt typo which I believe has been fixed). I think this is a great way to start, thank you for building it.

I have a few suggestions.

Make the code easily copyable. Under Chrome, at any rate, if you select the code you can't help but select your comments to the left of the code. I think that people running through the examples should type everything in line by line, but some people will prefer to copy and paste.

Also, it would be great to have some "where to go from here" links. I've run the examples, now I want to write some useful code. Where should I go next?

Mark, I'm curious to know if you find yourself using Go or Clojure more these days.

They're quite different languages, so I was surprised to see a bunch of Go libraries in your Github after using a bunch of Clojure gear you'd written over the years.

https://gobyexample.com/slices gives the impression that arrays and slices are independent things, which is not true. A slice cannot exist without an underlying array. A slice is a window view on an array, a reference to a part of an array. Multiple slices can provide different views on the same array. When you create a completely new slice you also create a new underlying array and the window size is initially the same as the size of the array.

That's a great format for short examples. I'm kind of proud of this hobo tutorial[1], which I put together a few years ago. It uses the git commit comment for the article text, giving a clear explanation on how to evolve a larger program. This format will make it very easy for me to update it to Hobo 2.0 without introducing the inevitable mistakes you'd get just updating a text document.

1: http://cookbook.hobocentral.net/tutorials/agility

If you just want the good stuff, it is at https://gobyexample.com/

Looks like an excellent project, with a really clear and simple approach. I'd love to see more of these approaches for other languages, but I'm looking forward to working through this one.

Looks very nice, I am gearing up to really dive into Go soon (waiting to finish up a class, to free up the time) and this looks like it will be a good resource.

These are the kinds of guides that I think the budding gopher needs. Golang.org has some beautiful examples but they are a bit terse.

This is a really good format. One of the best language tutorials I've seen.

This is great. Much better speed than http://tour.golang.org for people who already know other languages. Thanks!

Nice, I was looking for something like this.

Congrats on the site and thanks. As a guy interested in Go, I plan to check it out over time.