[tptacek]

One thing Golang did that was really smart was to have a very slick documentation generator run from unformatted comments, using just a convention for how to write the prose. You have an incentive to write good comments (they're how you document your library to its users), and the comments godoc demands you write also work naturally as comments qua comments.

A lot of Golang is like this: very simple, almost trivial-seeming decisions that potently improve the language in practice. It's a fundamentally simple weapon, it's forged from Damascus steel.