5 ms·

It looks more 'corporate' because they paid more attention to the site's information architecture[1]: rather than presenting you with a wall of text like old si

It looks more 'corporate' because they paid more attention to the site's information architecture[1]: rather than presenting you with a wall of text like old sites do, you're presented with what it is, why you should care, what it's like, and all in straightforward terms. That's easier to consume than the dense paragraph of material you get in the likes of the GNU Screen page. If you squint, you'll see things clearly: the page is broken up with whitespace into distinct sections, and there are no gigantic blobs of text. In contrast, the GNU Screen page is basically one big black blob of text between a header and a footer. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_architecture

denniskane 11y ago
Maybe. But at least the information on the Screen page is the god's honest truth... This site, however, is a load of pure propaganda. > With Guile you can create applications and games for the desktop, the Web, the command-line, and more. You can create applications on the web with Lisp? Really?!? And tell me about all of those wonderful command-line games! But then there is always the "more". Whatever the hell that is. Holy shit, the world has just gone completely insane.
- rekado 11y ago
  For all those wonderful command-line games and applications on the web with Lisp I suggest reading "The Land of Lisp" ;)
- taylanub 11y ago
  >And tell me about all of those wonderful command-line games! You can pry my MUDs out of my cold, dead hands, thank you very much. More seriously, it simply says {applications, games} x {desktop, web, CLI}, where the (game, CLI) tuple is left for the reader to filter out. Obviously it primarily means CLI applications. I think you're being unreasonably pedantic. And yes, server-side programming is part of web programming. I really see nothing wrong with the new Guile website. In fact I think it's excellent both in information and artwork. :-)
  - denniskane 11y ago
    >Obviously it primarily means CLI applications. I think you're being unreasonably pedantic. My point is that that style of conveying information is more propagandistic than it is truly informative. It is in the style of a typical startup in the valley run by Stanford whiz kids who are trying to impress their classmates as much anything else. Everyone who is already hip to hacker culture knows how to correctly interpret those kinds of statements, but everyone else is just left more confused. Gnu-ish tools like Guile really have no place in the marketplace of "hipster in a Starbucks with a Macbook plastered with shiny decals" kinds of technologies, and to pretend otherwise is to do a disservice to humanity, IMO. I just see this style of "informing" as an end of a kind of age of innocence, when seekers of deep knowledge about technology could go to the gnu.org domain, and be absolutely certain that they weren't being sold a bill of goods.
- Grue3 11y ago
  >You can create applications on the web with Lisp? Really?!? You do realize Hacker News itself is a Lisp application on the web?
  - denniskane 11y ago
    >You do realize Hacker News itself is a Lisp application on the web? ...and now we finally arrive at the fundamental quarrel that I have with using the terms "web" and "application", such that, when linked, can lead to a state of confusion about the nature of the technologies involved. In the generic sense, there is application vs theory, so that everything that has to do with a real computer program is always going to be an "application", and therefore, any arbitrary program that is used as a backend for a website, can indeed be called something of an "application for the web". But this is not what normal human beings are thinking about when they use the word "application" in conjunction with their own computing devices. They are thinking about whatever is running on their machine that they can sense, and can thus physically interact with. In this way, the correct dichotomy is application vs service. So, the Lisp backend for HN is just a service for the user facing application (the web browser). All of this goes hand-in-hand with my larger point about styles of informing that are not quite as informative as they can possibly be.
- talideon 11y ago
  > This site, however, is a load of pure propaganda. No, it's advertising, and not dishonest advertising. > You can create applications on the web with Lisp? Really?!? Yes! You know, something on the server has to generate the content. > And tell me about all of those wonderful command-line games! They point to a game engine written with guile: http://dthompson.us/pages/software/sly.html http://dthompson.us/pages/software/sly.html > But then there is always the "more". Whatever the hell that is. Because it's a Turing-complete programming language: that's what the 'more' is. You can do practically anything you can imagine with it.
jolux 11y ago
Oh sure, it's not a good design, but it has no pretenses about what it is. It's what you expect from an open source project, for better or for worse (definitely for worse in this case). However, if we're going to expect more, it should look more like the new Guile site and less like this. The black, textured background is ugly, the dayglo buttons clash, the yellow text is the shade of dehydrated urine, and the bullet points at the top are a poor attempt at a higher information density full of buzzwords that nobody visiting the site _really_ cares about. If you want to talk about information architecture, the three bullet points at the top aren't really about why you should care. The first is unnecessary FSF wankery, everyone looking up Guix already knows what they're all about and is tired of hearing about being liberated. The next two don't strongly differentiate the product from any other package manager in previous ways. Okay, so it does x, y, and z interesting things. The switching cost of changing operating systems is very high. Why shouldn't I keep using what I have now? What tangible benefits will I receive from using GuixSD? Why is Guix unique, specifically? WHAT MAKES GUIX DIFFERENT? (answer to all four: it's declarative, though this isn't mentioned anywhere) None of these are addressed. Nix is not even mentioned, even though Guix is Nix with a Guile wrapper around it. The nixos.org website, on the other hand, is superlative. Why do you want NixOS? It's Declarative, Reliable, and DevOps friendly. It's "The Purely Functional Linux Distribution". Those five words say more about it and why a prospective contributor should be using it (it's mostly functional programmers and declarative programming nerds who are interested in Nix/Guix, though Nix being akin to Chef/Puppet/Ansible on steroids is helping it gain ground among DevOps people) than the entire GNU Guix homepage does.
- ArneBab 11y ago
  answer to what makes guix different (for me): I can install it as a user on top of my existing distro. Like PyPI done right; for the whole system.
- taylanub 11y ago
  Sorry but I have to disagree on pretty much every single point. In part you simply make factual errors. I think the page looks fairly stylish. Could improve, but pretty great already in choice of colors and layout. ("Dehydrated urine" for a simple gold color? Seriously? Stop watching watersports.) Being 100% free software as in GNU, meaning being entirely free of uninspectable binary blobs, and working hard to make the system easily improvable and amendable by the user community, is a big deal. Deal with it. GNU aims for people for whom these are important criteria. The features listed in the second point are based in concepts that are nontrivial to grok. There is no short way to explain them on an intro front page, but not mentioning them would be silly since they are what sets Guix apart from standard package managers (which ironically is what you request being listed). Maybe you should look up the meanings of those terms instead of straight out assuming they're marketing buzz. Transactional updates, and unprivileged/user-level package management are pretty big deals. Likewise, providing clean APIs in a high-level programming/scripting language is very much a big deal; see how easily a web front-end could be made for Guix. Redirecting newcomers to Nix would just add an unnecessary layer of indirection. The name is clearly a homage to Nix, and also otherwise "everybody knows" that Guix is Guile+Nix, so claiming there's malicious intent in leaving out a mention of Nix would be just silly. And Guix is not a Guile wrapper around Nix; it has an entirely different package recipe format and database. You don't use Guix to work with a Nix system; rather the Guix system uses a low-level component taken from Nix. Casual users don't need to know anything about Nix. Lastly, functional package management brings immense pragmatic benefits (source-binary correspondence, reliability of transactional updates, etc.), i.e. it's not simply a dogmatic application of FP concepts to package management. You'll note that Guix uses Scheme, not Haskell. I think most people interested in functional package management are so for the practical benefits, so I think you have a pretty wrong image of those folks. All in all, please make sure you have a proper understanding of a topic before making such inflammatory remarks. It doesn't help anyone.

denniskane 11y ago

Maybe. But at least the information on the Screen page is the god's honest truth... This site, however, is a load of pure propaganda. > With Guile you can create applications and games for the desktop, the Web, the command-line, and more. You can create applications on the web with Lisp? Really?!? And tell me about all of those wonderful command-line games! But then there is always the "more". Whatever the hell that is. Holy shit, the world has just gone completely insane.

rekado 11y ago
For all those wonderful command-line games and applications on the web with Lisp I suggest reading "The Land of Lisp" ;)
taylanub 11y ago
>And tell me about all of those wonderful command-line games! You can pry my MUDs out of my cold, dead hands, thank you very much. More seriously, it simply says {applications, games} x {desktop, web, CLI}, where the (game, CLI) tuple is left for the reader to filter out. Obviously it primarily means CLI applications. I think you're being unreasonably pedantic. And yes, server-side programming is part of web programming. I really see nothing wrong with the new Guile website. In fact I think it's excellent both in information and artwork. :-)
- denniskane 11y ago
  >Obviously it primarily means CLI applications. I think you're being unreasonably pedantic. My point is that that style of conveying information is more propagandistic than it is truly informative. It is in the style of a typical startup in the valley run by Stanford whiz kids who are trying to impress their classmates as much anything else. Everyone who is already hip to hacker culture knows how to correctly interpret those kinds of statements, but everyone else is just left more confused. Gnu-ish tools like Guile really have no place in the marketplace of "hipster in a Starbucks with a Macbook plastered with shiny decals" kinds of technologies, and to pretend otherwise is to do a disservice to humanity, IMO. I just see this style of "informing" as an end of a kind of age of innocence, when seekers of deep knowledge about technology could go to the gnu.org domain, and be absolutely certain that they weren't being sold a bill of goods.
Grue3 11y ago
>You can create applications on the web with Lisp? Really?!? You do realize Hacker News itself is a Lisp application on the web?
- denniskane 11y ago
  >You do realize Hacker News itself is a Lisp application on the web? ...and now we finally arrive at the fundamental quarrel that I have with using the terms "web" and "application", such that, when linked, can lead to a state of confusion about the nature of the technologies involved. In the generic sense, there is application vs theory, so that everything that has to do with a real computer program is always going to be an "application", and therefore, any arbitrary program that is used as a backend for a website, can indeed be called something of an "application for the web". But this is not what normal human beings are thinking about when they use the word "application" in conjunction with their own computing devices. They are thinking about whatever is running on their machine that they can sense, and can thus physically interact with. In this way, the correct dichotomy is application vs service. So, the Lisp backend for HN is just a service for the user facing application (the web browser). All of this goes hand-in-hand with my larger point about styles of informing that are not quite as informative as they can possibly be.
talideon 11y ago
> This site, however, is a load of pure propaganda. No, it's advertising, and not dishonest advertising. > You can create applications on the web with Lisp? Really?!? Yes! You know, something on the server has to generate the content. > And tell me about all of those wonderful command-line games! They point to a game engine written with guile: http://dthompson.us/pages/software/sly.html http://dthompson.us/pages/software/sly.html > But then there is always the "more". Whatever the hell that is. Because it's a Turing-complete programming language: that's what the 'more' is. You can do practically anything you can imagine with it.

jolux 11y ago

Oh sure, it's not a good design, but it has no pretenses about what it is. It's what you expect from an open source project, for better or for worse (definitely for worse in this case). However, if we're going to expect more, it should look more like the new Guile site and less like this. The black, textured background is ugly, the dayglo buttons clash, the yellow text is the shade of dehydrated urine, and the bullet points at the top are a poor attempt at a higher information density full of buzzwords that nobody visiting the site _really_ cares about. If you want to talk about information architecture, the three bullet points at the top aren't really about why you should care. The first is unnecessary FSF wankery, everyone looking up Guix already knows what they're all about and is tired of hearing about being liberated. The next two don't strongly differentiate the product from any other package manager in previous ways. Okay, so it does x, y, and z interesting things. The switching cost of changing operating systems is very high. Why shouldn't I keep using what I have now? What tangible benefits will I receive from using GuixSD? Why is Guix unique, specifically? WHAT MAKES GUIX DIFFERENT? (answer to all four: it's declarative, though this isn't mentioned anywhere) None of these are addressed. Nix is not even mentioned, even though Guix is Nix with a Guile wrapper around it. The nixos.org website, on the other hand, is superlative. Why do you want NixOS? It's Declarative, Reliable, and DevOps friendly. It's "The Purely Functional Linux Distribution". Those five words say more about it and why a prospective contributor should be using it (it's mostly functional programmers and declarative programming nerds who are interested in Nix/Guix, though Nix being akin to Chef/Puppet/Ansible on steroids is helping it gain ground among DevOps people) than the entire GNU Guix homepage does.

ArneBab 11y ago
answer to what makes guix different (for me): I can install it as a user on top of my existing distro. Like PyPI done right; for the whole system.
taylanub 11y ago
Sorry but I have to disagree on pretty much every single point. In part you simply make factual errors. I think the page looks fairly stylish. Could improve, but pretty great already in choice of colors and layout. ("Dehydrated urine" for a simple gold color? Seriously? Stop watching watersports.) Being 100% free software as in GNU, meaning being entirely free of uninspectable binary blobs, and working hard to make the system easily improvable and amendable by the user community, is a big deal. Deal with it. GNU aims for people for whom these are important criteria. The features listed in the second point are based in concepts that are nontrivial to grok. There is no short way to explain them on an intro front page, but not mentioning them would be silly since they are what sets Guix apart from standard package managers (which ironically is what you request being listed). Maybe you should look up the meanings of those terms instead of straight out assuming they're marketing buzz. Transactional updates, and unprivileged/user-level package management are pretty big deals. Likewise, providing clean APIs in a high-level programming/scripting language is very much a big deal; see how easily a web front-end could be made for Guix. Redirecting newcomers to Nix would just add an unnecessary layer of indirection. The name is clearly a homage to Nix, and also otherwise "everybody knows" that Guix is Guile+Nix, so claiming there's malicious intent in leaving out a mention of Nix would be just silly. And Guix is not a Guile wrapper around Nix; it has an entirely different package recipe format and database. You don't use Guix to work with a Nix system; rather the Guix system uses a low-level component taken from Nix. Casual users don't need to know anything about Nix. Lastly, functional package management brings immense pragmatic benefits (source-binary correspondence, reliability of transactional updates, etc.), i.e. it's not simply a dogmatic application of FP concepts to package management. You'll note that Guix uses Scheme, not Haskell. I think most people interested in functional package management are so for the practical benefits, so I think you have a pretty wrong image of those folks. All in all, please make sure you have a proper understanding of a topic before making such inflammatory remarks. It doesn't help anyone.