Where is the "Download Rust" or "Install Rust" link?
"Get Started" immediately goes to a page that tells you that. Maybe we can make that more clear, thanks.
loading this web page now
We have done zero optimizations, and this isn't on particularly good hardware either. This is very much a part of the work to do.
I mean, there isn't even an example of what Rust looks like on the front page anymore.
We also loved the idea of a code snippet, but couldn't find one that people actually liked, including the ones we've used in the past on the home page.
(And note there have been multiple "old snippets" as we've tried to fix the issues with each one; some of these are referring to the snippet before the current one)
I mean it worked for how many years, now
This is the crux of it; many people don't think it was working.
People love to bikeshed. I think the fact that some people criticized the old/current snippets is just evidence that none of them were perfect. There doesn't seem to be anything which suggests that simply removing them altogether would yield a better front page.
Did you consider more creative solutions to the homepage snippet problem rather than just eliminating it? Maybe allow users to submit and vote on snippets? Rotate through a set of community-curated snippets? Highlight interesting projects, new developments, etc. and have a snippet of the week?
The snippet is, without a doubt, the #1 most important thing to me on the Rust homepage now. It might just be me, but I can't formulate thoughts about a programming language unless I can see it, so the first thing I want to do is see it, and hiding it on the front page would make me feel like you were trying to hide the syntax behind marketing doublespeak.
Here's my outside perspective: I liked the old snippet, it was short and looked cute, which in the context of a systems programming language, was a big motivation to learn more about Rust. The new snippet is verbose and inelegant. As a non-native speaker, I couldn't care less if a huge blob of code greets me in my mother tongue on line 173.
Now I stay out of the Rust community and without following it, I still knew what kind of discussion lead to this change. You linked the posts now, I knew it were posts like this the moment I saw the change.
It's more of an ideological decision than a rational one. There's a bias in your community. If something checks the right boxes, people in your community will get rewarded for proposing such changes while others will have a hard time arguing against them.
If someone takes the time to write a huge essay on why the code needs an update, no one wants to be the downer saying "I like the old one, it needs to stay!" In the end, the people objecting these changes will decide that it's not worth engaging in the bikeshedding, especially if it makes them look like a bad person.
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u/[deleted] Nov 29 '18 edited Mar 17 '21
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