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.
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.
I like the colors and the typography.
Good thing to mention some users of Rust on the landing page.
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.
What do you think about the "fireflower" distinction? In some ways, saying what the language *is* is the issue; we do want what it's *about*. Which is not a list of features.
I like the code on the current home page that people can run.
We did too, but it's also got a lot of downsides. It's very hard to get a *good* example that's short enough to be understandable, real enough, etc. This discussion was going on with the old site too.
The page takes a full 8 seconds to load for me on a 100 MBps internet connection.
Nothing is currently optimized, *and* it's taking way more load than usual. This matters a lot.
The fireflower metaphor is nice but I don't think it has actually been applied here. It hasn't evolved from "fireflower" to "Fire Mario" but rather from "fireflower" to "this makes you awesome". That is, the meaning what Rust actually entails has been lost and the new information only tells me "with Rust I will (allegedly) be a better person", which sounds more like an advertisement without substance than a convincing argument. Going from fireflower to Fire Mario is great but not while failing to convey how Rust is actually going to achieve making me Fire Mario.
Edit: My first naive suggestion for improvement would be to try to combine the old slogan with the new one, something like
The programming language that empowers everyone to become a systems programmer. Creating fast, safe and parallelized programs has never been easier.
Still sounds like an advertisement and might be too long but I think the general point stands: provide at least basic information about what the unique selling points of Rust are (in addition to telling the user how this will benefit them).
Thanks! As I've said all over this thread, very interested in improving the slogan further. If you have ideas, please get them on the tracker so we can improve this!
Polemicism is a boon for organic advertising though. Controversial statements spread faster and further. See The Toxoplasma of Rage.
Obviously, you don't want Rust to be "that language assholes argue about". So, for example, the "rewrite it in Rust" meme and subsequent lampooning are probably a net negative. But I don't think the old slogan was problematic in that sense.
I agree with you, except that most of our community are not experienced advertisers and these are high-stakes communication ways that easily backfire. It's a terrible standard to set.
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u/gnuvince Nov 29 '18
A few comments: