[Haskell-cafe] New slogan for haskell.org

[Henning Thielemann]

On Tue, 27 Nov 2007, Thomas Davie wrote:

> On 27 Nov 2007, at 14:44, David Menendez wrote:
>
> > On Nov 26, 2007 1:44 PM, Thomas Davie <tom.davie at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > But the point is that this section of the site is the bit that's meant
> > to be an advertisement -- we're trying to encourage people to read
> > more,
> >
> > Are we? I thought Haskell.org was intended to describe what Haskell
> > *is*. There are plenty of articles and blog posts and wiki pages out
> > there that advocate Haskell. I don't see why the main web page needs
> > to be polluted with marketing.
>
> Because someone's first contact with Haskell is likely to be someone
> saying "I use this really cool language called Haskell", or a lecturer
> teaching it to them.  In either case, if a tiny amount of interest is
> sparked, their likely second contact is likely to be haskell.org
> (through guessing or googling).

I think this is true, but for me it means, that we do not need another
advertisement at Haskell.org, but facts. I also expect that people
visiting the site already know about static typing and have categorized
themselves into static typing lovers or haters. They will also have heard
about polymorphism (just like object-orientation :-). So they only need to
find out about the words, they do not know.

>  Quite frankly, there's nothing going to put me off a language more than
> a paragraph full of unknown buzz words that I have to look up on the
> front page.
>
> There's plenty of places on Haskell.org where we can describe what
> haskell *is*, but the front page should be used for grabbing peoples
> attention and telling them why it's useful.

Haskell.org is not only for new users. I like it as front page, because of
the news and the entry points to the Wiki.