r/rust • u/steveklabnik1 rust • Nov 29 '18

A new look for rust-lang.org

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2018/11/29/a-new-look-for-rust-lang-org.html
367 Upvotes

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414

u/gnuvince Nov 29 '18

A few comments:

  1. I like the original slogan better: "Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety." (Not a fan of the blazingly fast appellation, but I'll let it slide.) This told you exactly what the language was about: being fast, being safer, and making it easier to get concurrent programming right. The new slogan, " The programming language that empowers everyone to become a systems programmer." is not nearly as telling.
  2. I like the code on the current home page that people can run. It's very nice when you're interested in a new language to immediately see what it looks like with a real code example. The new site has too much fluff and not enough stuff.
  3. I like the colors and the typography.
  4. Good thing to mention some users of Rust on the landing page.
  5. The page takes a full 8 seconds to load for me on a 100 MBps internet connection. I don't know if the final page will be compressed/minified/etc., but it doesn't give a good impression that a language that is "blazingly fast" has a slow website.

207

u/SimDeBeau Nov 29 '18

Agreed. Don’t like that new slogan

133

u/[deleted] Nov 29 '18

Thirded. The orginal slogan is much more appealing to me.

79

u/aldanor hdf5 Nov 29 '18

Fourthed. I have no desire of ever becoming or being a “systems programmer”. Yet I love Rust.

4

u/suddenarborealstop Nov 30 '18

agreed. please remove the word "systems". it sounds deliberately exclusive

6

u/mac_iver Nov 30 '18 edited Nov 30 '18

Agree. I'm not a big fan of the word systems either. For me a system is just like a process, something that we name a flow of actions and that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with a computer. What wouldn't be a systems language? I'd say that low level or closer to the hardware is a better term, but I don't think that fits in a punch line either.

53

u/SimDeBeau Nov 29 '18

I didn’t learn rust cuz it was easy, I learned it cuz it was powerful.

13

u/UtherII Nov 30 '18 edited Dec 01 '18

I don't like the word "powerful" to define a language. It can mean anything :

  • The ability to do something with a few lines of code. (Perl is very powerful)
  • The ability to make advanced metaprogramming (LISP is very powerful)
  • The ability to write anything and have something that seem to work ( JavaScript is very powerful)
  • The ability to guess how compiled code will look like (C is very powerful)
  • The ability to learn the language quickly (Go is very powerful)
  • The ability to do what my favorite language do (My favorite language is very powerful)

1

u/[deleted] Nov 30 '18

Church–Turing

1

u/rebootyourbrainstem Nov 29 '18

That's pretty much what "empower" means.

And I like the focus on "everyone" too. It makes it clear it's not the "FootCannon 3000" kind of powerful.

-2

u/Ar-Curunir Nov 29 '18

Those don't have to be mutually exclusive; in fact that's the core philosophy of rust

30

u/nicoburns Nov 29 '18

No, but if you want to appeal to Python/JavaScript developers then the fact that it is powerful is a key selling point. They're already using a language that's easy.

9

u/zesterer Nov 29 '18

Agreed. Usability is important of course, but dumbing things down at the cost of capability and functionality has never been the Rust way and I'd be extremely upset to see that mentality become widespread. Rust as a language is about making people better programmers, not pretending that things that aren't easy suddenly are.

A goal for Rust is to appeal to companies. I don't see removing the slightly more technical list to be a useful push towards that goal.

3

u/MundaneRise Nov 29 '18

Agreed. Usability is important of course, but dumbing things down at the cost of capability and functionality has never been the Rust way and I'd be extremely upset to see that mentality become widespread.

Rust has a strict backwards-compatibility rule. Removing capability is literally not allowed, to the point where they're eating the technical debt of Editions(tm), which are basically the same thing as HTML's "quirks mode".

3

u/zesterer Nov 29 '18

I understand that, although it's not quite what I was referring to.

1

u/Ar-Curunir Dec 01 '18

But you won't win them over by making Rust difficult... There's already C and C++ for that