6 ms·

Why Are Programming Languages Sites So Ugly?

30 points by sgdesign 14y ago

sgdesign 14y ago
Note: this post was inspired by this discussion on the Go thread yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4548144 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4548144
anigbrowl 14y ago
They're a reflection of the people who create them (rimshot). Honestly, I blame Unix/Gnu (http://www.gnu.org/ http://www.gnu.org/). Most programmers are command-line oriented and think GUIs are a distraction. It doesn't bother them that most newbies have no means of discovering features absent menus and suchlike, and that means design takes a backseat on their websites too. I personally thought the go website was a lot better than most; at least it's (semantically) accessible, even if it's cartoonish.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- k3n 14y ago
  I agree with you, and would add that the precursor to the modern full-featured browser-based WWW was a CLI-based web (Lynx et. all), whereby the only means of formatting text were akin to what you get out of a word processor (linebreaks, bold, italics, etc.). Also, most programmers (like those making the languages) aren't designers, and when they try to be, very bad things can happen[1]. Could they hire a designer? Probably not, seeing as most of those projects are FOSS, and the maintainers get paid nothing for their efforts. There's also the fact that the maintainers of those languages, and likely a majority of the users, would prefer development efforts be focused on the language itself and not its website. [1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/this-is-what-happens-when-you-let-developers-create-ui.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/this-is-what-happen...
twog 14y ago
Sacha, If you are interested, I would love to team up with you to contribute an open source design and I will do the markup. As a developer, I have long hated the design of many sites. After the awesome redesign of http://git-scm.com/ http://git-scm.com/ I wanted to make contribute another design to one of the terrible OSS sites that are out there. What do you say, are you interested in teaming up?
- twog 14y ago
  My portfolio is at http://twogiraffes.com http://twogiraffes.com
- Alexandervn 14y ago
  The new Git website is awesome. It makes you think: if they spend that much attention to every detail, this product must be really good..
archgoon 14y ago
What are the problems with Go's website? If the website appeals to the target audience, than it's designed correctly.
- sgdesign 14y ago
  Maybe the problem is precisely the target audience. The current site only appeals to a very specific kind of people.
  - archgoon 14y ago
    Let me rephrase: What are some specific objections that you have with the Go website?
    - sgdesign 14y ago
      If you can't compare the Go site and, say, http://git-scm.com/ http://git-scm.com/ and see which one is better designed, then I don't think anything I can say will change your mind. It's just a general feeling, specific objections are not important. But here are a few anyway: -There is no logo to establish a brand identity - The mascot looks amateurish - There is no thought given to typograph or colors. Contrast this with the Git site where, for example, body copy is not pure black to avoid a harsh contrast. - The documentation uses a fluid width layout which hurts readability on wide screens
      - saurik 14y ago
        You are treating "better designed" as a single axis: the question should be "better designed for X" given a specific value of X. As an example, to take your feedback item "the mascot looks amateurish" <- the kind of quirky humor that the people who designed this project have, and are thereby are appealing to, actually likes that mascot. In the genre of programming languages, this is quite honestly very typical: that mascot is part of what makes it feel like a programming language "worth paying attention to" to people like me (aka, people who study and learn interesting programming languages). Without taking into account this context, your feedback is frankly about as closed minded and generally insulting as claiming that XKCD (or hell: anything by Don Hertzfeldt, which is probably an even stronger extreme case) is poorly executed because the artwork is likewise "amateurish" to someone used to full-color 3D rendered 60 fps animation (or hell: an actual HD video). However, these people have managed to entrench an entire genre of art that now others try to invoke in their own audiences. Personally, I find the git-scm.com website to be full of way too much clipart and not enough personality; to the extent to which there is personality, I might call it "Web 2.0 with a hint of retro-corporate", which is highly awkward as I have always felt git represented something grungier, certainly "harsher": tied to ideas like raw power and distributed anti-disestablishment as opposed to control or simplicity. However, someone liked that website, and apparently you do. I find http://darcs.net/ http://darcs.net/ much better at first glance, for a version control tool. The original author (edit: apparently, also you) even liked the Firebase website, which has always turned me off as something designed to attract people who don't know what they are doing: it feels too "Web 2.0" and has much too strong an emphasis on "nothing to something" as opposed to "something to something great" to be a product to which I'd trust storing my data. Of course: I'm not in their target market, as I don't need their service and in fact "know too much" and can nitpick how they built it; they are targeting people who don't know enough to build backends, and that design thereby probably works for them. I thereby can't negatively judge their website without paying attention to that context. tl;dr different strokes for different folks
hermanhermitage 14y ago
I think its in the eye of the beholder. The Go site looks fine to me, whilst https://github.com/404 https://github.com/404 is downright ugly. EDIT: I notice how the OP link is a horrid design too. This has to be a troll.
- gebe 14y ago
  I feel this way too. I even kind of like the no bullshit design ("design") on PHP's site as well. It's fast and it's clear and it makes me reminisce about the times when I didn't need a top of the line computer just to surf the fucking web.
  - saiko-chriskun 14y ago
    It is /not/ "in the eye of the beholder". UX is a science. If you can't tell the difference between PHP's site and, say, git's, well, I don't think there's much else to talk about here.
    - debaserab2 14y ago
      Er, what? Please explain -- I type a function name into PHP's search box (or actually, at this point it's so well indexed on Google all I need to do is type the function name into Chrome's omnibox) and I get exactly what I'm looking for. I'm guessing I'm not in the minority of people who visit PHP's site for language doc / reference. As an end user, php.net gives me what I'm looking for 95% of the time. How is that not good UX? I do like github and find it to be well organized as well, although it's search leaves something to be desired and sometimes I find myself fumbling through the UI to find a specific git feature. Although I'd argue that the breadth of functionality they need to cover is beyond that of a language site like PHP's. On a complete sidenote, I've always thought github's 404 page was neat, but what does it have to do with good UX?
      - sgdesign 14y ago
        I know you're replying to Saiko-chriskun, but I would just like to point out that my post was not about UX. I don't have any complaints about the UX of the Go site (although as far as PHP is concerned, they could probably remove some of the clutter on there).
labizaboffle 14y ago
A lot of Ruby sites are nice, like: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html
the_cat_kittles 14y ago
It kind of reflects the aesthetic of the given language itself, to some degree- for instance, http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/index.html http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/index.html http://flask.pocoo.org/ http://flask.pocoo.org/ both seem clean in the way python is, visually.
- yen223 14y ago
  That website for Requests to me is a great example that you don't have to choose between being beautiful and being functional.
  - kenneth_reitz 14y ago
    <3
zalew 14y ago
> Having the PHP site in your design portfolio would open doors with a lot of people. That's true for beginners with a weak portfolio. Experienced ones don't care about php, they have commercial projects in there. > Plus, a lot of designers are already spending their time working for free anyway. If you don’t believe me, just look at the number of Instagram redesigns or iTunes icons on Dribbble. Hey, let's try to find a programmer who will code your website for free. Lots of them do stuff for free anyway, just look on github and bitbucket. Now seriously (I am aware there are a lot of generalizations in there, but I think they are not far from the most common): The thing is, just like coders publish opensource, designers publish icons and redux because it's their cause, their branch, their market. And just like you wouldn't code a random designer's project while publishing lots of libraries for other programmers, he won't design yours while publishing fonts and icons elswhere to prove something. Second, while programming in commitee works (in general), webdesign by commitee doesn't and always results in crap. And experienced designers have the 'my way or the highway' approach anyway. Third, most designers just don't get opensource quite well, while most opensource gurus just don't get design quite well. The former ones don't feel why they should do it, the latter ones don't feel the need to make use of the ones who would even if they are there. If a designer finds a programmer who will work for free, 99% chance he's very unexperienced. The same comes to getting a designer for free. ps. let's see how the Django redesign works out https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/django-developers/2Xy7SZAOc7E https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/django-de...
- sgdesign 14y ago
  I would love to prove you wrong, so let's hope somebody contacts me to redesign their site through this article.
  - zalew 14y ago
    It would be even better if you started up a trend of designers making cool websites for opensource projects, for free. A gang of opensource designers, that's an awesome idea. I'm really surprised reading a lot of comments about not seeing what's wrong with php or golang sites. Ugh.
maratd 14y ago
> PHP is an old language, a relic of a bygone era! > And there’s some truth to this. > More modern languages like Python or Ruby have somewhat decent sites. Ruby and Python were both around way before PHP. Get your story straight, Mr. Hater.
- sgdesign 14y ago
  I'm confused if you're accusing me of hating on PHP, or Ruby & Python, or all of them. In any case I'm sure you know what I mean, there's clearly a move away from PHP and towards Ruby & Python, at least in these parts.
  - ChiperSoft 14y ago
    Ruby & Python are growing, but not at the cost of PHP. New developers are choosing non-PHP languages when moving into the market.
olalonde 14y ago
> [...] PHP is an old language [...] More modern languages like Python or Ruby have somewhat decent sites. Just a nitpick but PHP (1995) is not older than Ruby (1995) or Python (1991). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)
- coldarchon 14y ago
  Just one more reason for me the author seems to be a designer who thinks he is a programmer when he copies code snippets together. Obviously all the "likes" come from his friends at Starbucks which told him about their posts via mobile while sitting next table with a 3 hour old coffee. Seriously he cares about the design of the mascots and typography? Does he chose a language because of Helvetica and then complains about its bugs although the functions aren't even featured in the language?
Detrus 14y ago
The current Go homepage is surprisingly good functionally and aesthetically. PHP, Clojure, Haskell sites look like monolithic corporate website templates aesthetically. The main problem is with the author who can't appreciate good design when it doesn't fit his trendy aesthetic sensibilities.
halefx 14y ago
Just FYI, PHP has had a redesign in the works for a long time. http://prototype.php.net/ http://prototype.php.net/
- sgdesign 14y ago
  Much nicer!
ChiperSoft 14y ago
How can you give the PHP site a hard time for looking old and then praise Python's modified WikiMedia layout? The point of all of these sites is to maximize functionality and make language information easy to get at. All that maters is UX, graphical niceties don't improve on that, and no one serious about learning a new language is really going to be dissuaded by "ugliness". But the real answer to the title question is simple: They're made by programmers, not designers.
- sgdesign 14y ago
  > no one serious about learning a new language is really going to be dissuaded by "ugliness" What about people who are not serious? As I said in my post, this "ugliness" acts as a filter to turn away non-experts. Whether this is good or bad depends on your point of view, I personally think it's bad.
  - ryankey 14y ago
    People who aren't serious don't really matter, unless they become serious. The new design will alienate people who had gotten used to it and enjoyed that it was easy to find the resources they needed. Also, any language not already attracting new users probably won't have many incentives for keeping them around (I'm thinking of lisp with its scary parentheses). Being fairly new to programming myself, I've actually noticed that the most powerful languages usually have websites with terrible aesthetics. It usually means that instead of worrying about how the site looks, most of the people involved are solving problems with the language. The only changes come when usability is hindered.
- yen223 14y ago
  PHP's main page is a good example of how not to design a main page. - The first thing the user sees is a massive wall of text. The whole site looks visually cluttered. Everything is arranged haphazardly. - The more useful parts (e.g. the introduction, documentation links, download links) are hidden away in small corners of the site. - The relatively useless Events and News sections take up >80% of the site. Python's site looks slightly better, but not by much.
Daniel_Newby 14y ago
But! but! but! Django has a pony!!! http://djangopony.com/ http://djangopony.com/
- zalew 14y ago
  the actual django page is being redesigned https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/django-developers/2Xy7SZAOc7E https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/django-de...
freestylesno 14y ago
I think a big part of it has to do with the fact that a lot of the people using the languages are engineers or like minded people.
luriel 14y ago
I think the main Go site could be improved, but i quite like the new version of the Go tour: http://tour.golang.org http://tour.golang.org
k3n 14y ago
It's like an unwritten maxim: the more technical a site is, the more basic its design. A corollary might be: the more in-demand (famous) a person is, the more basic their site will be. Here's some "homepages" from programming gurus: Dennis Ritchie: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/ http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/ Brian Kernighan: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/ http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/ Bjarne Stroustrup: http://www.stroustrup.com/ http://www.stroustrup.com/ Richard Stallman: http://stallman.org/ http://stallman.org/
- minikomi 14y ago
  Don't forget http://norvig.com/ http://norvig.com/
  - k3n 14y ago
    Hah, yes, there's tons out there.
- zalew 14y ago
  those sites were up before CSS, it has nothing to do with demand.
  - k3n 14y ago
    Most (if not all) have been updated since the advent of CSS, though. You may be correct about demand, but it just seems logical to me that when a notable programmer is spending lots of time either coding, or travelling the country speaking at conferences and/or having high-level meetings, etc...basically, busy all the time...the last thing on their mind is "I need to make my website pretty". I think that most of what they host on their site is simply either for their own reference or for the reference of others. I know I've said more than once "just go to my site, it's linked there" when asked a question about something (and I'm the most un-notable there is).
simanyay 14y ago
Look at this site: http://kernel.org/ http://kernel.org/ Design is plain, the mascot looks amateurish, there is no logo to establish brand identity. They don't know how to sell anything, this will never catch on.
- saiko-chriskun 14y ago
  sigh
- sgdesign 14y ago
  Perfect example of a strawman argument. Nobody said that bad design was preventing something from catching on at all. I said that good design would help something catch on.
  - simanyay 14y ago
    Except that you did: > I know you pretend like you don’t care, but I’m sure that down deep you’re wondering why NodeJS is getting all the attention instead of you.
melvinmt 14y ago
Sorry, your active link colors distracted me. What were you saying? Ergo, I can't be bothered to look at funny 404 cartoons when I'm trying to read documentation.
- saiko-chriskun 14y ago
  active link colors distracted you? what? so.. you don't use syntax highlighting in your editor? and what exactly does a 404 page have to do with a page with actual content.
geoka9 14y ago
Because they contain documentation and have to be fast and readable. While modern web-design, it seems, is bent on creating slow sites with barely readable gray letters on off-white backgrounds.
Alexandervn 14y ago
It's not about being "ugly" and needing help to become "beautiful". It's what you are trying to tell people. Partly, it's a good thing if these sites look a bit amateurish, because they should look grassroots. It should look like: wow, I can join this. It should look authentic. A nice example of this is www.drupal.org (where you can join) versus www.drupal.com (where you should "buy"). The new Git website is very nice. But is also a very mature project. It doesn't need help from thousands of people. It needs a lot of consumers and maybe some brilliant minds to share their ideas. What the Go website tells: this is a very young project (not even a logo), we have some backing from Google (hence the name and the colours), we have something good (by calling it "easy" and "reliable"), but we could need your help (by still calling it "The Project") and you might want to try (look you can even try it top-left on our homepage) this if you are curious and want to have fun (see our goofy, eye-rolling, mascot).
samrat 14y ago
I think the Python Software Foundation was asking for redesign proposals for the Python site a while ago; so we might see some improvements for the Python site. I don't find the Python site particularly ugly, but I think the docs could improve a lot. Same goes for a lot of other python frameworks that use the default Sphinx template.
Akram 14y ago
Design is irrelevant when it comes to programing sites. We programmers want to get straight to the code and some times design becomes a distraction. I have no issues with the Go site and even the PHP site. It is great until I can quickly find what I'm looking for.
- frechg 14y ago
  If the design is a distraction then it is bad design. Good design would help you easily and happily "get straight to the code".
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
laumars 14y ago
What a stupid article. Looking pretty is far less important than being functional. And his site is the perfect example of that; it looked pretty, but the content only took up a 50% column of the total viewable space (and that's without having my browser window set to full screen). His site would be terrible for productivity driven sites like PHP's manual. Also I reject his premiss that language sites need to be pretty to attract developers. You pick a language based on it's suitability for a project, not whether it has lashes of CSS3 and bespoke type-faces. To even suggest otherwise is painfully superficial. There's an old adage: less is more. And I think that's very true when discussing sites that are designed to serve content rather than sell content.
geoka9 14y ago
There's another reason, I think. Making a site look fashionable (and web design is really like the clothes industry in that sense) will require the authors to revisit it avery year or so, whenever the design fad du jour changes. While black text on white background is like jeans and t-shirts - not too hip, but always acceptable.

30 points by sgdesign 14y ago

Note: this post was inspired by this discussion on the Go thread yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4548144 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4548144

anigbrowl 14y ago

They're a reflection of the people who create them (rimshot). Honestly, I blame Unix/Gnu (http://www.gnu.org/ http://www.gnu.org/). Most programmers are command-line oriented and think GUIs are a distraction. It doesn't bother them that most newbies have no means of discovering features absent menus and suchlike, and that means design takes a backseat on their websites too. I personally thought the go website was a lot better than most; at least it's (semantically) accessible, even if it's cartoonish.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
k3n 14y ago
I agree with you, and would add that the precursor to the modern full-featured browser-based WWW was a CLI-based web (Lynx et. all), whereby the only means of formatting text were akin to what you get out of a word processor (linebreaks, bold, italics, etc.). Also, most programmers (like those making the languages) aren't designers, and when they try to be, very bad things can happen[1]. Could they hire a designer? Probably not, seeing as most of those projects are FOSS, and the maintainers get paid nothing for their efforts. There's also the fact that the maintainers of those languages, and likely a majority of the users, would prefer development efforts be focused on the language itself and not its website. [1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/this-is-what-happens-when-you-let-developers-create-ui.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/this-is-what-happen...

twog 14y ago

Sacha, If you are interested, I would love to team up with you to contribute an open source design and I will do the markup. As a developer, I have long hated the design of many sites. After the awesome redesign of http://git-scm.com/ http://git-scm.com/ I wanted to make contribute another design to one of the terrible OSS sites that are out there. What do you say, are you interested in teaming up?

twog 14y ago
My portfolio is at http://twogiraffes.com http://twogiraffes.com
Alexandervn 14y ago
The new Git website is awesome. It makes you think: if they spend that much attention to every detail, this product must be really good..

archgoon 14y ago

What are the problems with Go's website? If the website appeals to the target audience, than it's designed correctly.

sgdesign 14y ago
Maybe the problem is precisely the target audience. The current site only appeals to a very specific kind of people.
- archgoon 14y ago
  Let me rephrase: What are some specific objections that you have with the Go website?
  - sgdesign 14y ago
    If you can't compare the Go site and, say, http://git-scm.com/ http://git-scm.com/ and see which one is better designed, then I don't think anything I can say will change your mind. It's just a general feeling, specific objections are not important. But here are a few anyway: -There is no logo to establish a brand identity - The mascot looks amateurish - There is no thought given to typograph or colors. Contrast this with the Git site where, for example, body copy is not pure black to avoid a harsh contrast. - The documentation uses a fluid width layout which hurts readability on wide screens
    - saurik 14y ago
      You are treating "better designed" as a single axis: the question should be "better designed for X" given a specific value of X. As an example, to take your feedback item "the mascot looks amateurish" <- the kind of quirky humor that the people who designed this project have, and are thereby are appealing to, actually likes that mascot. In the genre of programming languages, this is quite honestly very typical: that mascot is part of what makes it feel like a programming language "worth paying attention to" to people like me (aka, people who study and learn interesting programming languages). Without taking into account this context, your feedback is frankly about as closed minded and generally insulting as claiming that XKCD (or hell: anything by Don Hertzfeldt, which is probably an even stronger extreme case) is poorly executed because the artwork is likewise "amateurish" to someone used to full-color 3D rendered 60 fps animation (or hell: an actual HD video). However, these people have managed to entrench an entire genre of art that now others try to invoke in their own audiences. Personally, I find the git-scm.com website to be full of way too much clipart and not enough personality; to the extent to which there is personality, I might call it "Web 2.0 with a hint of retro-corporate", which is highly awkward as I have always felt git represented something grungier, certainly "harsher": tied to ideas like raw power and distributed anti-disestablishment as opposed to control or simplicity. However, someone liked that website, and apparently you do. I find http://darcs.net/ http://darcs.net/ much better at first glance, for a version control tool. The original author (edit: apparently, also you) even liked the Firebase website, which has always turned me off as something designed to attract people who don't know what they are doing: it feels too "Web 2.0" and has much too strong an emphasis on "nothing to something" as opposed to "something to something great" to be a product to which I'd trust storing my data. Of course: I'm not in their target market, as I don't need their service and in fact "know too much" and can nitpick how they built it; they are targeting people who don't know enough to build backends, and that design thereby probably works for them. I thereby can't negatively judge their website without paying attention to that context. tl;dr different strokes for different folks

hermanhermitage 14y ago

I think its in the eye of the beholder. The Go site looks fine to me, whilst https://github.com/404 https://github.com/404 is downright ugly. EDIT: I notice how the OP link is a horrid design too. This has to be a troll.

gebe 14y ago
I feel this way too. I even kind of like the no bullshit design ("design") on PHP's site as well. It's fast and it's clear and it makes me reminisce about the times when I didn't need a top of the line computer just to surf the fucking web.
- saiko-chriskun 14y ago
  It is /not/ "in the eye of the beholder". UX is a science. If you can't tell the difference between PHP's site and, say, git's, well, I don't think there's much else to talk about here.
  - debaserab2 14y ago
    Er, what? Please explain -- I type a function name into PHP's search box (or actually, at this point it's so well indexed on Google all I need to do is type the function name into Chrome's omnibox) and I get exactly what I'm looking for. I'm guessing I'm not in the minority of people who visit PHP's site for language doc / reference. As an end user, php.net gives me what I'm looking for 95% of the time. How is that not good UX? I do like github and find it to be well organized as well, although it's search leaves something to be desired and sometimes I find myself fumbling through the UI to find a specific git feature. Although I'd argue that the breadth of functionality they need to cover is beyond that of a language site like PHP's. On a complete sidenote, I've always thought github's 404 page was neat, but what does it have to do with good UX?
    - sgdesign 14y ago
      I know you're replying to Saiko-chriskun, but I would just like to point out that my post was not about UX. I don't have any complaints about the UX of the Go site (although as far as PHP is concerned, they could probably remove some of the clutter on there).

labizaboffle 14y ago

A lot of Ruby sites are nice, like: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html

the_cat_kittles 14y ago

It kind of reflects the aesthetic of the given language itself, to some degree- for instance, http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/index.html http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/index.html http://flask.pocoo.org/ http://flask.pocoo.org/ both seem clean in the way python is, visually.

yen223 14y ago
That website for Requests to me is a great example that you don't have to choose between being beautiful and being functional.
- kenneth_reitz 14y ago
  <3

zalew 14y ago

> Having the PHP site in your design portfolio would open doors with a lot of people. That's true for beginners with a weak portfolio. Experienced ones don't care about php, they have commercial projects in there. > Plus, a lot of designers are already spending their time working for free anyway. If you don’t believe me, just look at the number of Instagram redesigns or iTunes icons on Dribbble. Hey, let's try to find a programmer who will code your website for free. Lots of them do stuff for free anyway, just look on github and bitbucket. Now seriously (I am aware there are a lot of generalizations in there, but I think they are not far from the most common): The thing is, just like coders publish opensource, designers publish icons and redux because it's their cause, their branch, their market. And just like you wouldn't code a random designer's project while publishing lots of libraries for other programmers, he won't design yours while publishing fonts and icons elswhere to prove something. Second, while programming in commitee works (in general), webdesign by commitee doesn't and always results in crap. And experienced designers have the 'my way or the highway' approach anyway. Third, most designers just don't get opensource quite well, while most opensource gurus just don't get design quite well. The former ones don't feel why they should do it, the latter ones don't feel the need to make use of the ones who would even if they are there. If a designer finds a programmer who will work for free, 99% chance he's very unexperienced. The same comes to getting a designer for free. ps. let's see how the Django redesign works out https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/django-developers/2Xy7SZAOc7E https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/django-de...

sgdesign 14y ago
I would love to prove you wrong, so let's hope somebody contacts me to redesign their site through this article.
- zalew 14y ago
  It would be even better if you started up a trend of designers making cool websites for opensource projects, for free. A gang of opensource designers, that's an awesome idea. I'm really surprised reading a lot of comments about not seeing what's wrong with php or golang sites. Ugh.

maratd 14y ago

> PHP is an old language, a relic of a bygone era! > And there’s some truth to this. > More modern languages like Python or Ruby have somewhat decent sites. Ruby and Python were both around way before PHP. Get your story straight, Mr. Hater.

sgdesign 14y ago
I'm confused if you're accusing me of hating on PHP, or Ruby & Python, or all of them. In any case I'm sure you know what I mean, there's clearly a move away from PHP and towards Ruby & Python, at least in these parts.
- ChiperSoft 14y ago
  Ruby & Python are growing, but not at the cost of PHP. New developers are choosing non-PHP languages when moving into the market.

olalonde 14y ago

> [...] PHP is an old language [...] More modern languages like Python or Ruby have somewhat decent sites. Just a nitpick but PHP (1995) is not older than Ruby (1995) or Python (1991). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)

coldarchon 14y ago
Just one more reason for me the author seems to be a designer who thinks he is a programmer when he copies code snippets together. Obviously all the "likes" come from his friends at Starbucks which told him about their posts via mobile while sitting next table with a 3 hour old coffee. Seriously he cares about the design of the mascots and typography? Does he chose a language because of Helvetica and then complains about its bugs although the functions aren't even featured in the language?

Detrus 14y ago

The current Go homepage is surprisingly good functionally and aesthetically. PHP, Clojure, Haskell sites look like monolithic corporate website templates aesthetically. The main problem is with the author who can't appreciate good design when it doesn't fit his trendy aesthetic sensibilities.

halefx 14y ago

Just FYI, PHP has had a redesign in the works for a long time. http://prototype.php.net/ http://prototype.php.net/

sgdesign 14y ago
Much nicer!

ChiperSoft 14y ago

How can you give the PHP site a hard time for looking old and then praise Python's modified WikiMedia layout? The point of all of these sites is to maximize functionality and make language information easy to get at. All that maters is UX, graphical niceties don't improve on that, and no one serious about learning a new language is really going to be dissuaded by "ugliness". But the real answer to the title question is simple: They're made by programmers, not designers.

sgdesign 14y ago
> no one serious about learning a new language is really going to be dissuaded by "ugliness" What about people who are not serious? As I said in my post, this "ugliness" acts as a filter to turn away non-experts. Whether this is good or bad depends on your point of view, I personally think it's bad.
- ryankey 14y ago
  People who aren't serious don't really matter, unless they become serious. The new design will alienate people who had gotten used to it and enjoyed that it was easy to find the resources they needed. Also, any language not already attracting new users probably won't have many incentives for keeping them around (I'm thinking of lisp with its scary parentheses). Being fairly new to programming myself, I've actually noticed that the most powerful languages usually have websites with terrible aesthetics. It usually means that instead of worrying about how the site looks, most of the people involved are solving problems with the language. The only changes come when usability is hindered.
yen223 14y ago
PHP's main page is a good example of how not to design a main page. - The first thing the user sees is a massive wall of text. The whole site looks visually cluttered. Everything is arranged haphazardly. - The more useful parts (e.g. the introduction, documentation links, download links) are hidden away in small corners of the site. - The relatively useless Events and News sections take up >80% of the site. Python's site looks slightly better, but not by much.

Daniel_Newby 14y ago

But! but! but! Django has a pony!!! http://djangopony.com/ http://djangopony.com/

zalew 14y ago
the actual django page is being redesigned https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/django-developers/2Xy7SZAOc7E https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/django-de...

freestylesno 14y ago

I think a big part of it has to do with the fact that a lot of the people using the languages are engineers or like minded people.

luriel 14y ago

I think the main Go site could be improved, but i quite like the new version of the Go tour: http://tour.golang.org http://tour.golang.org

k3n 14y ago

It's like an unwritten maxim: the more technical a site is, the more basic its design. A corollary might be: the more in-demand (famous) a person is, the more basic their site will be. Here's some "homepages" from programming gurus: Dennis Ritchie: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/ http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/ Brian Kernighan: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/ http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/ Bjarne Stroustrup: http://www.stroustrup.com/ http://www.stroustrup.com/ Richard Stallman: http://stallman.org/ http://stallman.org/

minikomi 14y ago
Don't forget http://norvig.com/ http://norvig.com/
- k3n 14y ago
  Hah, yes, there's tons out there.
zalew 14y ago
those sites were up before CSS, it has nothing to do with demand.
- k3n 14y ago
  Most (if not all) have been updated since the advent of CSS, though. You may be correct about demand, but it just seems logical to me that when a notable programmer is spending lots of time either coding, or travelling the country speaking at conferences and/or having high-level meetings, etc...basically, busy all the time...the last thing on their mind is "I need to make my website pretty". I think that most of what they host on their site is simply either for their own reference or for the reference of others. I know I've said more than once "just go to my site, it's linked there" when asked a question about something (and I'm the most un-notable there is).

simanyay 14y ago

Look at this site: http://kernel.org/ http://kernel.org/ Design is plain, the mascot looks amateurish, there is no logo to establish brand identity. They don't know how to sell anything, this will never catch on.

saiko-chriskun 14y ago
sigh
sgdesign 14y ago
Perfect example of a strawman argument. Nobody said that bad design was preventing something from catching on at all. I said that good design would help something catch on.
- simanyay 14y ago
  Except that you did: > I know you pretend like you don’t care, but I’m sure that down deep you’re wondering why NodeJS is getting all the attention instead of you.

melvinmt 14y ago

Sorry, your active link colors distracted me. What were you saying? Ergo, I can't be bothered to look at funny 404 cartoons when I'm trying to read documentation.

saiko-chriskun 14y ago
active link colors distracted you? what? so.. you don't use syntax highlighting in your editor? and what exactly does a 404 page have to do with a page with actual content.

geoka9 14y ago

Because they contain documentation and have to be fast and readable. While modern web-design, it seems, is bent on creating slow sites with barely readable gray letters on off-white backgrounds.

Alexandervn 14y ago

It's not about being "ugly" and needing help to become "beautiful". It's what you are trying to tell people. Partly, it's a good thing if these sites look a bit amateurish, because they should look grassroots. It should look like: wow, I can join this. It should look authentic. A nice example of this is www.drupal.org (where you can join) versus www.drupal.com (where you should "buy"). The new Git website is very nice. But is also a very mature project. It doesn't need help from thousands of people. It needs a lot of consumers and maybe some brilliant minds to share their ideas. What the Go website tells: this is a very young project (not even a logo), we have some backing from Google (hence the name and the colours), we have something good (by calling it "easy" and "reliable"), but we could need your help (by still calling it "The Project") and you might want to try (look you can even try it top-left on our homepage) this if you are curious and want to have fun (see our goofy, eye-rolling, mascot).

samrat 14y ago

I think the Python Software Foundation was asking for redesign proposals for the Python site a while ago; so we might see some improvements for the Python site. I don't find the Python site particularly ugly, but I think the docs could improve a lot. Same goes for a lot of other python frameworks that use the default Sphinx template.

Akram 14y ago

Design is irrelevant when it comes to programing sites. We programmers want to get straight to the code and some times design becomes a distraction. I have no issues with the Go site and even the PHP site. It is great until I can quickly find what I'm looking for.

frechg 14y ago
If the design is a distraction then it is bad design. Good design would help you easily and happily "get straight to the code".

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

laumars 14y ago

What a stupid article. Looking pretty is far less important than being functional. And his site is the perfect example of that; it looked pretty, but the content only took up a 50% column of the total viewable space (and that's without having my browser window set to full screen). His site would be terrible for productivity driven sites like PHP's manual. Also I reject his premiss that language sites need to be pretty to attract developers. You pick a language based on it's suitability for a project, not whether it has lashes of CSS3 and bespoke type-faces. To even suggest otherwise is painfully superficial. There's an old adage: less is more. And I think that's very true when discussing sites that are designed to serve content rather than sell content.

geoka9 14y ago

There's another reason, I think. Making a site look fashionable (and web design is really like the clothes industry in that sense) will require the authors to revisit it avery year or so, whenever the design fad du jour changes. While black text on white background is like jeans and t-shirts - not too hip, but always acceptable.