[ashearer]

The page itself is set in the proportional version of Go. I found it distracting to read because of the uneven character widths. The majority of the characters (like 'b', 'd', 'f', 'k', 'l', 'o', and 't') are narrow, but some common letters (mainly the 'e' and 'c') are round and wide, with generous space around them. I can't get past the impression that I'm reading paper that wrinkled when it went through the printer. Even the name "Go" has a wide G, awkwardly large space, and narrow "o". Perhaps it's an artifact of the browser rendering, because it's less noticeable on the alphabet sample image.

The monospaced example reminds me of TeX-produced CS papers at first glance. I'll have to give it some time.

[fusiongyro]

There are some bad kerns too. Look at "Yet" and notice the 'e' is not tucked under the 'Y' at all.

[kccqzy]

The alphabet sample image has problems too. The space after uppercase G is plentiful compared to the space after uppercase V. Granted VX is not a common letter combination but still this shows some bad kerning nonetheless.

Also I find the hyphen surprisingly wide (in the proportional version). In fact so wide that I keep thinking it's an en–dash and it reduces my reading speed: my brain has to slow down and mentally correct it to hyphen.

[SomethingOrNot]

> Also I find the hyphen surprisingly wide (in the proportional version). In fact so wide that I keep thinking it's an en–dash ...

So did I! At first I thought that they had inserted en-dashes by some mistake.

[pmontra]

The monospaced font looks very old, I don't like the look of it.

The proportional one is ok but it can't be used for programming. In part because of the reasons you gave but especially because there is almost no gap between the two = characters in == and @ is almost superscripted, which looks wierd.

I'm going back to Sans Regular (whatever it is on Ubuntu). It has its own problems (I and l look the same) but it's still better.

[iainmerrick]

Yes! You put your finger on it -- it looks old!

That's not necessarily a bad thing. Instead of "old" you could call it "retro". But it definitely reminds me of the formatting of K&R, which makes sense as the Go team see themselves as the heirs of the K&R tradition.

[mark-r]

When I saw the monospaced font, I immediately thought "Courier". The differences are subtle, must less pronounced than the similarities. I wonder why they didn't just make a monospaced version of the Sans?