> On Dec 29, 2018, at 21:32, Philip McGrath <phi...@philipmcgrath.com> wrote:
>
>> Respectfully, I would also concentrate on Rackets web presence. If I was to
>> google any of the popular languages, I would find the answer to these
>> questions in spades, with real life applications, and examples. You can
>> also compare Pythons website to Rackets. Pythons website seems to be
>> design more for advertising Python. If I go to the Pythons web page there
>> is a section “use Python for” in it, it has various topics such as web
>> development, GUI development, scientific and numeric, with all the
>> applicable packages needed. If you knew nothing about Python, but where
>> interested in using it for web development, it easy to see where to go, etc.
>>
>
> I would be interested to hear more about your experience with Racket's web
> site, because it tries to include these things, but evidently it did not
> succeed in communicating them to you. When I go to https://racket-lang.org/
> and scroll down about one screen's worth, I see short, runable examples of a
> few flashy features including web development and GUI applications
> specifically, with links to tutorials and documentation.
The previous version of the Racket website (before its redesign two years ago)
included such things more explicitly, in a format non-Racketters (which is who
the homepage is for, after all!) are more likely to comprehend. It included,
among other things, a clear purpose statement for the language at the very top
of the page, a set of small, to the point code examples that showed off various
kinds of general-purpose programming (with explanations), and a set of links to
further resources clearly geared towards programmers of different skill levels.
To give you a sense for how this website used to be targeted, here’s the
aforementioned purpose statement, in its entirety:
> Racket is a full-spectrum programming language. It goes beyond Lisp and
> Scheme with dialects that support objects, types, laziness, and more. Racket
> enables programmers to link components written in different dialects, and it
> empowers programmers to create new, project-specific dialects. Racket's
> libraries support applications from web servers and databases to GUIs and
> charts.
The concepts enumerated in the above statement are linked to the relevant
sections in the Guide for those interested in learning more.
The following code snippets showed Racket doing mundane but useful tasks an
“ordinary” programmer would likely understand. They included things like simple
scripting using the filesystem, a small web server, basic terminal I/O,
creating a GUI window, a toy web scraper, and even sending e-mail. Towards the
end of this carousel of snippets, some of Racket’s language-oriented
programming features start to sneak in — there’s a small Typed Racket program,
a document written in Scribble, and even a tiny datalog database — but these
are clearly secondary to the main point: Racket is a full-spectrum,
general-purpose programming language, and if you already know how to program,
it is grounded in things familiar to you.
If you are interested in seeing the old homepage, in all its late aughts design
glory, it is preserved with full functionality here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161129144201/http://www.racket-lang.org:80/
The redesign of the Racket website shifted the emphasis from Racket as a
general-purpose programming language to Racket as a language workbench. There
is no doubt that this shift has its advantages — Racket’s support for
language-oriented programming is one of its features that sets it apart most
significantly from other ecosystems. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ve gotten
far enough to really push #lang as a killer feature to the working programmer
yet, so I don’t think the current design does much to convey why the average
person should care (especially since it focuses a lot on building languages
while the old homepage focused more on using languages). I expressed some of
these concerns, among others, when the redesign was first proposed; if you are
interested, you can read the discussion here:
https://github.com/racket/racket-lang-org/pull/28
Now, admittedly, it’s easy to complain, but actions speak louder than words: I
have put zero effort into making the website better, while I’m sure MB
volunteered several days of his time. The website is open source, and perhaps
if I truly cared, I would invest some of my own free time into suggesting (and
implementing) concrete changes. I simply have not. I’m sure a pull request
would be welcomed, should anyone submit one to clarify some confusion they
bumped into. On the other hand, it obviously isn’t the responsibility of those
outside of the Racket community to invest time into making Racket’s website
better, especially given the effort involved, so it does not surprise me it has
been left largely unchanged.
Alexis
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