Re: [Haskell-cafe] New slogan for haskell.org

On Tue, 27 Nov 2007, Thomas Davie wrote:

On 27 Nov 2007, at 14:44, David Menendez wrote:

...

On Nov 26, 2007 1:44 PM, Thomas Davie wrote:

But the point is that this section of the site is the bit that's meant to be an advertisement -- we're trying to encourage people to read more,

Are we? I thought Haskell.org was intended to describe what Haskell *is*. There are plenty of articles and blog posts and wiki pages out there that advocate Haskell. I don't see why the main web page needs to be polluted with marketing.

Because someone's first contact with Haskell is likely to be someone saying "I use this really cool language called Haskell", or a lecturer teaching it to them. In either case, if a tiny amount of interest is sparked, their likely second contact is likely to be haskell.org (through guessing or googling).

I think this is true, but for me it means, that we do not need another advertisement at Haskell.org, but facts. I also expect that people visiting the site already know about static typing and have categorized themselves into static typing lovers or haters. They will also have heard about polymorphism (just like object-orientation :-). So they only need to find out about the words, they do not know.

Quite frankly, there's nothing going to put me off a language more than a paragraph full of unknown buzz words that I have to look up on the front page.

There's plenty of places on Haskell.org where we can describe what haskell *is*, but the front page should be used for grabbing peoples attention and telling them why it's useful.

Haskell.org is not only for new users. I like it as front page, because of the news and the entry points to the Wiki.