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

On Tue, 2007-11-27 at 08:34 -0800, David Fox wrote:

On Nov 27, 2007 8:14 AM, Henning Thielemann wrote:

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.

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In that case we need to identify all the groups that the front page is serving and create separate areas for each, all "above the fold" as it were:

1. A "sales pitch" for new users. I see how much this disturbs some people, but maybe it is better to think of it as a quick introduction with a focus on benefits and comparisons to things which are already familiar. This is what one needs when one is in the stage of deciding whether to pursue something.

2. After you have decided whether to pursue Haskell, you probably want to decide *how* to pursue it. In this section would be much of what is there now - links to the definition, documentation, and important tutorials, mailing lists, and so on.

3. Finally, you want a section for people who are already deeply involved. This would be a news section, probably an RSS feed, links to newsletters, and so on.

This thread should focus on part 1 above. I think it would be a huge mistake to deliberately omit this material because "we do not need another advertisement at Haskell.org, but facts." Its all facts! Haskell.org needs to serve everyone who arrives there.

I agree. I know that all those things belong on the front page, but we have to start somewhere. In order to keep the thread productive I decided to post a concrete draft to work with rather than a general approach. I do not want to remove any other parts of the page, except for the slogan. We could re-arrange things a little, though. For example, putting the "Getting Started" part in the middle rather than at the side is a good idea, IMO. Also, the headlines are a little out of date, so maybe we should push them down a little. So here's the current state, incorporating various suggestions and improvements. I'd like to keep the "research" keyword (but tied closely with "practical"), since this is one rather distinguishing aspect of Haskell. " Haskell is a modern, general-purpose, pure functional programming language that combines many powerful results from research into a practical programming language. Its features include: * Static typing increases robustness as the compiler will catch many common errors automatically. * Type inference deduces types automatically freeing the programmer from writing superfluous type signatures. * Higher-order functions, polymorphism, and laziness enable higher levels of abstraction, more compositional, thus more reusable code. * '''Purity''' helps to keep your code maintainable, enables automatic, randomized testing and eases concurrent programming significantly. Haskell comes with many libraries, freely available compilers for almost any computer, debuggers, profilers, code coverage and testing tools. [Maybe: * Monads, Arrows are powerful abstraction mechanisms that can be used to capture domain-specific abstractions, while retaining the safety of static typing. ] == Learn More == links to tutorials, books, wiki-pages (this could just be pointers to the side bar) == Get Involved == links to feeds, mailing lists, hackage, ... == Events == as before == Headlines == as before == News == as before. Or maybe in a side bar? using a 3-column layout? "