Public API Discussion about stats HOT 1 OPEN

Stubbled across this package hunting for statistics functions that operate over a slice of time.Duration, and retains the time unit in the return value. Anyway, thought I'd share my thoughts on your question about the public API.

My take is that it is best to have one way to do it, rather than many (as in the infamous Perl language). I believe this is also the Go standard library philosophy. For example, if you look at the bytes package, you will find a lot of functions that take a []byte, but none of those functions have an equivalent method based implementation. Similarly, the methods that operate on a Buffer object, are not repeated in the form of functions that take a Buffer as argument.

My suggestion would be to drop support for method invoke, and keep the function call approach.

from stats.