Nice analysis. A few remarks: * The results seem to confirm the arguments here that there's a problem with documentation and with the lack of a good "starter kit". Making the command line REPL better might help in that regard too (tab completion would not even be too difficult, given Clojure's introspective capabilities; just prefix-matching against (map name (keys (ns-map *ns*))) should do a decent job.
* Lisp is “oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in”? Who said that? WHAT?! LARRY $*@! WALL said it?! Well HE's hardly one to complain about Lisp's alleged readability deficits! :) * It would be nice to be able to see superpositions of last year's and this year's graphs somewhere, so the changes are made directly apprehensible to the eye, where applicable (same questions asked in both years). * How would you characterize your use of Clojure *today* -- you do know that HTML supports true italics, right? :) * What is the status of Clojure in your workplace -- the numbers sum to exactly 100, suggesting you made the options mutually exclusive. But the middle item potentially could have overlap with the ones directly above and directly below it and there are no "I don't know" or "N/A" type options showing in the output data. * Public relations -- Project status and activity. This area seems to suggest the main Clojure page should be covered in tickers and feeds of various kinds, but I'm not so sure about that. A lot of that stuff would be just so much clutter to a lot of users -- and others might find it *intimidating*: "What the heck *is* all of this stuff? Am I expected to understand *all* of it before I can do anything useful with this thing?". Google gets by with a very spare main page -- no, in fact it's one of Google's major plus points. So there's certainly no rule that says "success requires a cluttered main web page". My own ISP's main web page is a huge mess of stuff mostly irrelevant to why a customer would go to it -- random news tickers and other "portally" stuff that has nothing to do with Internet service status, checking your billing/usage/account setup, forwarding email while away, and the like, and finding the latter is a pain. There's also what's been said here about too many different possible "starter kit" configurations mentioned, like emacs+SLIME, Enclojure+NetBeans, Eclipse+CCW... -- wouldn't that apply more generally to any large globs of stuff on the front page? I'd suggest showing signs of activity in two main ways: one, list the five most recent posts of some developer blog that gets a new article every so often and two, possibly list the most recent few threads to get new posts in this mailing list and link to them at Google. And of course update the boilerplate cruft like the date on the page regularly -- but a script can do that automatically, or even dynamically generate the page with today's date. It's phony but it is probably effective and doesn't add clutter, and adding the two feeds I suggested doesn't add much and points people at this list and at current developer activity. A few more things maybe wouldn't hurt either, e.g. a Featured Library or Tip of the Week or some such, changed weekly. The developer blog, if adopted, should include at least two categories of items: development milestones achieved (particularly, decisions made, things implemented, and releases) and significant uptake events (this company/product/web service disclosed using Clojure, Heroku started supporting Clojure, etc.). "... so that people who wander into clojure.org can immediately have a positive impression, rather than requiring of them an analytical comprehension of Clojure’s minutiae?" An argument could be made that Clojure is aimed more at those who do that sort of "analytical comprehension" than those looking for the latest jazzy fad, but an argument could also be made that attracting a broader base is good and "jazzy fad" is a straw-man argument. :) -- Protege: What is this seething mass of parentheses?! Master: Your father's Lisp REPL. This is the language of a true hacker. Not as clumsy or random as C++; a language for a more civilized age. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
