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Compare it to other big language websites, like Kotlin [1] or Go [2], this page really seems to have a poor signal to noise ratio. There is a lot of information

Compare it to other big language websites, like Kotlin [1] or Go [2], this page really seems to have a poor signal to noise ratio. There is a lot of information on this landing page, and a lot of it is getting in the way. For a language, I want to know (a) features, (b) documentation / how to learn, (c) community. This website leads with this, but does so under playful headings ("jet-fueled") that just lead to more click-through links, and then immediately, on the landing page, jumps into advanced features (easy DSLs, IDE support, etc.). 2/3 of this landing page could be removed, and I suspect it would be a better landing page for it. In addition, it suffers from a poor use of vertical space (you will see the word "Racket" in a large font with plenty of padding 4 times on the main page), poor usage and indication of navigation (it has 4 navbars, which are not apparently navigation but appear to be "selling points" until your mouse moves over them, due to their being attached to headings), and poor use of navigation (reflowing the main page nave when you click on nav items). Compare this to Kotlin and Go's sites, which state the name, gives a snappy summary of the language, and then links off to more information. In the case of Kotlin, which is closer to Racket's site, it presents immediate links to extensive, example-driven write-ups about the most-important features on subpages, uses the remaining of the "first page" space on a "try it now" box, and then proceeds along vertical space (free in a browser) to demonstrate the most-important features. Finally, a smaller complaint: this website feels like it was made in Photoshop in the mid-00s, complete with text-image navigation bars sliced out of tables and drop shadows. I know someone put a lot of work into making divs look like that, but there are very good reasons why the industry has moved away from that design. 1. https://kotlinlang.org/ https://kotlinlang.org/ 2. https://golang.org/ https://golang.org/

petre 6y ago
Kotlin's website just opens new tabs and lost my interest in about two seconds and Go's isn't that great either. I like the new Racket webpage. It's got code, it's got links.
pjmlp 6y ago
Language websites are meaningless to me. I pick languages based on frameworks and platform SDKs. The language is a side effect of the ecosystem being targeted. Otherwise it is just like picking books based on the cover.
yomly 6y ago
I'm biased, but I clicked through to Kotlin and it didn't have any mobile friendly media queries - whereas I like the look and feel of the racket page on my tiny android screen.
- didibus 6y ago
  Same, Kotlin is a huge fail, if you can't get mobile friendly pages in 2020 it's a complete fail in my book.
- kaycebasques 6y ago
  At first I was going to say "I agree… in 2020 there's no reason not to have a mobile-friendly docs site… but in my experience with documentation sites, not many people visit from mobile devices". However, I just checked web.dev and developers.google.com/web and our mobile traffic is non-trivial.
  - nkrisc 6y ago
    As a hobbyist and self-taught programmer I (pre-COVID) spent a lot of time reading documentation on my phone while commuting home from work. I'm very pleased when documentation works well on a mobile device.
    - kaycebasques 6y ago
      What sites worked well for you? Anything in particular about how they worked well (or how other sites have not worked well)?
      - nkrisc 6y ago
        If have to go back and find examples, but there's not really much to it at all. A long as it's formatted nicely for reading on a small screen, that's a success. Most recently I suppose would be the Rust book: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ It's a delight on mobile. I've noticed many documentation sites she'd to be based some publishing platform that probably includes a good response mobile design, so it's a feature you can get "for free", yet not every docs site uses such a platform or just hasn't implemented their own responsive behavior. I'll update if I can remember one I read recently that didn't have a great mobile experience. It's really a very low bar.
somezero 6y ago
1/3 of Go’s website on my iOS screen, is “Recent news” plus a random “featured video”. For a landing page of a programming language, This is cartoonishly bad.
overthetop2 6y ago
> made in Photoshop in the mid-00s Haha, so true. TBH I didn't care for the previous Racket home page ... too arty farty. But at least it felt clean and current. This one, by contrast, feels totally retrograde. I wonder who made it? Hard for me to imagine a front-end designer today who would turn in work like this. Oh god I just noticed the drop shadows on the menus ... :facepalm:
- rscho 6y ago
  Maybe you could offer your services to make it better? Since they're a small open source community, my guess is that they don't have front-end designers of your calibre.
neilv 6y ago
In earlier discussion of a draft, a year ago, I looked at a bunch of examples, and zeroed in on Nim's home page (at the time) as a possible good example/inspiration for Racket (especially since I was pushing on a "3 ideas" focus, which, IIRC, Nim was also doing): https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/racket-dev/kJciZheDM3U https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/racket-dev/kJciZheDM... I think a few pretty ordinary challenges are: * Collectively, people think a lot of stuff is important, and don't want to drop it from the home page. A vicious designer would step in and cull and massage heavily, ignoring the screams of pain from most people. (Only in the end, might people generally agree it was worth the suffering, and then they'd help beat down anyone who tried to sneak bloat back in, after the carnage that everyone went through to get there.) * The people in charge and doing the work on the site, as a group, don't have the same ideas of what's important that professional practitioners do, nor the state of competition. So, priorities, phrasings, assertions, etc. will sometimes seem odd. This has come up at least a few times, in various ways, and might be part of why Racket didn't go mainstream when it had a better chance. (Though the leadership is not just pure academics. Just to pick the most prominent example, Prof. Matthew Flatt, besides the research and domain background, is a very solid programmer, with some good sense of software engineering.) * As a subset of general visual design, good graphic designers seem to do many subtle things that us techies don't fully appreciate. Familiar analogy: a novice software developer not only isn't yet able to do great work on tricky problems, but they don't even yet know what great work is, nor are they able to say what's great and not about some example they see. (The creators of the new site are mainly programming language and CS education people, not visual design, not HCI, etc., except sometimes people like [1].) On the upside, if a site for some techie thing looks a bit homely or awkward in some ways, you know it's at least not a tech offering driven by marketing, fashion, and funding. :) [1] One notable exception in Racket, though I don't know whether involved with the new site, is Matthew Butterick, as a diversely multi-skilled person. He did a lot of visual/graphic design work on other Racket stuff, which you can see by contrasting the old look of the documentation, with the current one. Old: http://planet.racket-lang.org/package-source/neil/roomba.plt/1/4/planet-docs/doc/index.html http://planet.racket-lang.org/package-source/neil/roomba.plt... Current: https://docs.racket-lang.org/roomba/index.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/roomba/index.html

petre 6y ago

Kotlin's website just opens new tabs and lost my interest in about two seconds and Go's isn't that great either. I like the new Racket webpage. It's got code, it's got links.

pjmlp 6y ago

Language websites are meaningless to me. I pick languages based on frameworks and platform SDKs. The language is a side effect of the ecosystem being targeted. Otherwise it is just like picking books based on the cover.

yomly 6y ago

I'm biased, but I clicked through to Kotlin and it didn't have any mobile friendly media queries - whereas I like the look and feel of the racket page on my tiny android screen.

didibus 6y ago
Same, Kotlin is a huge fail, if you can't get mobile friendly pages in 2020 it's a complete fail in my book.
kaycebasques 6y ago
At first I was going to say "I agree… in 2020 there's no reason not to have a mobile-friendly docs site… but in my experience with documentation sites, not many people visit from mobile devices". However, I just checked web.dev and developers.google.com/web and our mobile traffic is non-trivial.
- nkrisc 6y ago
  As a hobbyist and self-taught programmer I (pre-COVID) spent a lot of time reading documentation on my phone while commuting home from work. I'm very pleased when documentation works well on a mobile device.
  - kaycebasques 6y ago
    What sites worked well for you? Anything in particular about how they worked well (or how other sites have not worked well)?
    - nkrisc 6y ago
      If have to go back and find examples, but there's not really much to it at all. A long as it's formatted nicely for reading on a small screen, that's a success. Most recently I suppose would be the Rust book: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ It's a delight on mobile. I've noticed many documentation sites she'd to be based some publishing platform that probably includes a good response mobile design, so it's a feature you can get "for free", yet not every docs site uses such a platform or just hasn't implemented their own responsive behavior. I'll update if I can remember one I read recently that didn't have a great mobile experience. It's really a very low bar.

somezero 6y ago

1/3 of Go’s website on my iOS screen, is “Recent news” plus a random “featured video”. For a landing page of a programming language, This is cartoonishly bad.

overthetop2 6y ago

> made in Photoshop in the mid-00s Haha, so true. TBH I didn't care for the previous Racket home page ... too arty farty. But at least it felt clean and current. This one, by contrast, feels totally retrograde. I wonder who made it? Hard for me to imagine a front-end designer today who would turn in work like this. Oh god I just noticed the drop shadows on the menus ... :facepalm:

rscho 6y ago
Maybe you could offer your services to make it better? Since they're a small open source community, my guess is that they don't have front-end designers of your calibre.

neilv 6y ago

In earlier discussion of a draft, a year ago, I looked at a bunch of examples, and zeroed in on Nim's home page (at the time) as a possible good example/inspiration for Racket (especially since I was pushing on a "3 ideas" focus, which, IIRC, Nim was also doing): https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/racket-dev/kJciZheDM3U https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/racket-dev/kJciZheDM... I think a few pretty ordinary challenges are: * Collectively, people think a lot of stuff is important, and don't want to drop it from the home page. A vicious designer would step in and cull and massage heavily, ignoring the screams of pain from most people. (Only in the end, might people generally agree it was worth the suffering, and then they'd help beat down anyone who tried to sneak bloat back in, after the carnage that everyone went through to get there.) * The people in charge and doing the work on the site, as a group, don't have the same ideas of what's important that professional practitioners do, nor the state of competition. So, priorities, phrasings, assertions, etc. will sometimes seem odd. This has come up at least a few times, in various ways, and might be part of why Racket didn't go mainstream when it had a better chance. (Though the leadership is not just pure academics. Just to pick the most prominent example, Prof. Matthew Flatt, besides the research and domain background, is a very solid programmer, with some good sense of software engineering.) * As a subset of general visual design, good graphic designers seem to do many subtle things that us techies don't fully appreciate. Familiar analogy: a novice software developer not only isn't yet able to do great work on tricky problems, but they don't even yet know what great work is, nor are they able to say what's great and not about some example they see. (The creators of the new site are mainly programming language and CS education people, not visual design, not HCI, etc., except sometimes people like [1].) On the upside, if a site for some techie thing looks a bit homely or awkward in some ways, you know it's at least not a tech offering driven by marketing, fashion, and funding. :) [1] One notable exception in Racket, though I don't know whether involved with the new site, is Matthew Butterick, as a diversely multi-skilled person. He did a lot of visual/graphic design work on other Racket stuff, which you can see by contrasting the old look of the documentation, with the current one. Old: http://planet.racket-lang.org/package-source/neil/roomba.plt/1/4/planet-docs/doc/index.html http://planet.racket-lang.org/package-source/neil/roomba.plt... Current: https://docs.racket-lang.org/roomba/index.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/roomba/index.html