[ridaj]

Maybe this works for the language that the author is talking about, but in the cases that I'm familiar with, the standard library code does not give a good idea of what "normal" application code looks like. For example it's often got a bunch of platform-specific logic or low level optimizations that, as an application author, you probably want the standard lib to abstract away from you

[andi999]

Agree. I am thinking in C++ you do not want to read the std to learn the language.

[samus]

This is natural due to the low-level nature of a language implementation. And at some point, what's truly going on is often hidden behing a compiler intrinsic or a foreign function call to the runtime.

At the same time, there are going to be parts of the standard library that are less platform-specific and thus more readable, for example the Java Collection Framework.