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Racket Language – New website design

racket-lang.org

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Re: Racket Language – New website design

#21

Post by bshimmin »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #4

I don't want to be that guy, but I think the design needs work. Especially since the title is saying "has a new design". I wonder what it used to look like. It looks like a nice piece of technology, but like the other guy said, the website is too busy and I don't know where to look at. It took me a minute to find the github link. It's almost like it's hidden purposely. Also the "Books" section is kind of misleading a…

I don't think it's as bad as a domain parking web site, but there are some serious problems with it.

- The line drawings make it look like this is a charting library. Perhaps they have some mysterious symbolism, but to me it looks like the brief here was "differentiate these six main headings with... something". The "something" they ended up with is pretty devoid of value.

- Obviously, as others have said, the tagline does little to explain what Racket is. (cf. Rust's web site, which does a great job with this, even though it's incredibly minimal and has almost no design.)

- The code samples are low-contrast until clicked, and not really all that engaging even when clicked.

- The various links in the page go to all kinds of different sites, some under racket-lang.org and many not. The ones that are under racket-lang.org (with the exception of the blog) look absolutely nothing like racket-lang.org itself, and even have a different logo!

Re: Racket Language – New website design

#22

Post by gigatexal »

madawan wrote: post #18
gigatexal wrote: post #7

The website is fine I guess. What's more distracting is the lisp-like language. The parentheses are just too much. I guess I'm not one naturally inclined to functional languages.

It's racket, you can change the syntax at runtime if you so desire. (But if you learn to use the IDE the parens don't matter.)

Oh I didn't know that that's pretty cool then

Re: Racket Language – New website design

#23

Post by bad_login »

joesb wrote: post #17

"Solve problems. Make languages." That basically sums up my problem learning Racket. "What is Racket the language? What language am I supposed to learn? What language am I supposed to use in production code? Will one language be compatible with another? I got lost reading Racket document. One section talk about a class syntax of a language. Another talk about some other stuff that never utilize a class. What am I sup…

> I don't want to learn languages, I want to solve my problem.

I think the idea is that there is one good approach to solve a given problem (eg: use class to do the GUI code, use match to traverse some xml, use thread for async io instead of an event loop approach).

Re: Racket Language – New website design

#24

Post by eternalban »

edem wrote: post #14
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #4

I don't want to be that guy, but I think the design needs work. Especially since the title is saying "has a new design". I wonder what it used to look like. It looks like a nice piece of technology, but like the other guy said, the website is too busy and I don't know where to look at. It took me a minute to find the github link. It's almost like it's hidden purposely. Also the "Books" section is kind of misleading a…

You __are__ that guy. The design is cool and this is the best looking lisp site IMHO.

I like it & it certainly better than their previous effort, but the point regarding "charting library" is valid, imo. If I didn't know what Racket was, that would be my immediate impression as well.

Re: Racket Language – New website design

#25

Post by Nekorosu »

The design is ok. The interactions need some tweaks. The cursor should change to finger pointer on mouseover on code snippet. Probably it's better to highlight code snippet on mouseover before expanding it on click.

The other issue is all the links lead to pages with really old design. Hope this will get fixed too eventually.

Re: Racket Language – New website design

#26

Post by qntty »

madawan wrote: post #18
gigatexal wrote: post #7

The website is fine I guess. What's more distracting is the lisp-like language. The parentheses are just too much. I guess I'm not one naturally inclined to functional languages.

It's racket, you can change the syntax at runtime if you so desire. (But if you learn to use the IDE the parens don't matter.)

is DrRacket the IDE? If so, is there more to it than the REPL with the simple text editor above it?

Re: Racket Language – New website design

#28

Post by moron4hire »

qntty wrote: post #26
madawan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's racket, you can change the syntax at runtime if you so desire. (But if you learn to use the IDE the parens don't matter.)

is DrRacket the IDE? If so, is there more to it than the REPL with the simple text editor above it?

A lot more.

Re: Racket Language – New website design

#29

Post by aban »

The re-design was done by Matthew Butterick [0].

IMHO it looks nice and modern, and quite readable thanks to the great typography, but there are some fair issues raised here. So I opened an issue to let them know about it [1].

[0]: https://github.com/racket/racket-lang-org/pull/28

[1]: https://github.com/racket/racket-lang-org/issues/31

Re: Racket Language – New website design

#30

Post by jstewartmobile »

The docs are the only part I go to, and they look the same (not a bad thing, because they were always beautiful).

Felleisen and and his group have been working on Racket for a long time, and it shows. I think PG's Arc even runs on top of it.

Only gripe I can register is that they have gone full-speed-ahead on the DSL/metaprogramming aspect which kind of works against the language. See Tarver's "The Bipolar Lisp Programmer," or Alan Kay's quote: "Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material."

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