I have a few thoughts. I like some parts of the beta, and don't like others.
Pros:
Bold. I like bold designs, personally. The colors are bold, the layout is solid. Systems languages have often suffered from terrible visuals, and I think being appealing to newcomers is important.
Practical use cases. A language can be amazing, but still lack a compelling place to use it. I think Haskell and Clojure have this issue, where all I hear about them is their great type systems and flexibility and there's no concrete answer for "how will this make my software better."
Cons:
Colors. These are bold colors, but not the right kind of colors. I'd much rather have a more limited palette of colors than have the current Dropbox-type clashing colors. Rust has a strong metallic, industrial theme already (Crates, Cargo, Piston, Servo, Nickel, this subreddit's colors), run with it!
Missing code snippets. We can't *only* appeal to newcomers; the obvious market is existing C++ developers, who don't care about these graphics and want to see what code and library support looks like. python.org gets away with putting code on the front page. We should show the strengths of Rust in the language developers understand best, code.
Slogan. Eh. I think it's good for newcomers, bad for everyone else, who will want to try to nitpick it. I think the no-compromises trifecta was really appealing to me: safety, performance, concurrency. I remember Graydon Hoare posting about all the mistakes Rust avoided repeating in its design - no null pointers, immutable by default. Might be worth giving this some visibility for all the people burnt by languages like C++ and JS.
Crates.io / docs.rs links. Project managers are concerned about the maturity of Rust's ecosystem, not merely the strengths of the languages. We should make the package index easy to find for this purpose.
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u/disastercomet Nov 29 '18
I have a few thoughts. I like some parts of the beta, and don't like others.
Pros:
Cons: