The beta.rust-lang.org PR debacle

Sure. Most projects don’t get a huge rush of intense feedback all at once.

Is there anything to be learned from the flood of feedback that did happen? Perhaps some cross-pollination with the RFC process, which also sometimes gets more feedback in a short period than one can easily follow?

Those colors though. :-1:

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Here are the links for anyone who wants to read up on the other discussions:

Hacker News

Reddit r/rust

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/a1jjuf/a_new_look_for_rustlangorg/

Reddit r/programming

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a1jjyg/a_new_look_for_rustlangorg/

Also, i just noticed, the current main page at https://www.rust-lang.org has a big blue banner saying "Try out the new beta site!" on top. Given the current heated discussion, advertising the current beta that prominently may be unwise.

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I'd also strongly vote for bringing back the code snippets. I'm not a designer so can't comment exactly what's wrong with the new look, but I too prefer the old one. The new one looks like it's trying too hard and therefore coming off as a bit less honest. This is sure to turn off programmers compared to the old one in my humble opinion.

I love the beta site. There are various nits I could pick. But I won't. The new site makes information more accessible than the old, and does it in a more engaging way.

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I'd change the wording of:
"The programming language that empowers everyone to become a systems programmer."
To:
"Be a systems programmer"

This way it sounds like you are talking directly to me.

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I don't think this is what Rust should be stating. This would claim that Rust is only suitable for, and only cares about, systems programming. That's a small subset of what Rust is useful for.

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I would remove this line at all. I don't care about system programming, absolutely. And I love to write programms in Rust.

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Let me just highlight it. It's so well known practice - really surprising to see such "furious" design nowadays :slight_smile:

Excuse me my tone, but when I first opened beta site, my impression was "they are trying to sell some Rust tool to me or promoting some webinar". It's very aggressive, tones of links, zero text and examples (advertising things like "Rust has great documentation" is not a useful text).

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Argh, it’s a real shame Rust is ensnared in this circus show, especially with Rust 2018 edition release a few days away. It would’ve been a good look for people considering themselves to be part of the Rust community to provide their feedback on the beta site in a more constructive and less emotional manner. As it stands, I cringe at having this play out - I often mention the Rust community as one of its greatest assets, and this puts a fairly large blemish and tarnishes that reputation.

I’d also love to see people closely involved and associated with Rust development not participate in the social media exchanges that do nothing but perpetuate the current problem, and again, harm the reputation of the community.

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I'm not sure if feedback is welcome on the design of the beta site, but I have to agree on the titles being hard to read. I don't have great eyesight, and the titles stopped me for a small bit every time I tried to read them.

That said, the design felt warm. There was a lot of care on it, even if it might turn out to be not ideal or whatever. Kudos to the designers, you rock :slight_smile:

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The comment period for the new site was way too short. The escalation could have been prevented by asking for feedback a month ago at least. As it stands, it appears that the rushed action on issues is leading to creating the impression of abruptness and brashness. Hence, the vocal responses are a reflection on the misconstrued undertones communicated through actions. If everything did not have to happen so fast, that could have been prevented.

Emotional responses are part of what makes us human, and it isn't, imo, good to tell people to suppress their emotions in their responses, only to channel it correctly. I can understand the reason for being unhappy.

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I like the term systems programming. I understand a system programming language to mean a language that can program directly to the bare metal, and I also know that user-facing applications can also be written in this same language. Stated differently, I don't think stating "systems programmer" implies that it excludes any other kind of programming.

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Maybe. I’m not claiming the way this was “rolled out” was perfect, and for the record, I don’t like the current proposed beta myself. But what really bothers me is the way this is playing out across the internet, on reddit, hacker news, twitter, and so on, especially with some people defending things with “brogrammer” and “toxic masculinity” - IMO, those terms shouldn’t be present in any serious and well-intentioned discussion about Rust. And not to pick specifically on those - they happen to be mentioned in this thread most recently, but the other channels have quite a bit of this as well.

In a lot of ways, this is “match ergonomics” all over again, perhaps worse, and I guess we as a community haven’t gotten better at setting up the table to have these types of discussions properly.

People should try to channel them though because emotional responses, even if 100% valid, make people focus on the wrong thing: emotion, and not the content. If one wants to be heard, and I mean truly heard, lowering the emotion level helps.

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I think it would lower the emotion if the new site workgroup acknowledge that many in the community feel cut out of the creation of the new site. Hence, those who could have had a chance to participate and make the new site partly their own are now denied that chance. Just my view.

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Honestly, there's no way this could ever work.

The web site design for the front page of Rust is such a quintessential example of bikeshed painting that people are literally arguing about color choice. It was going to attract an interminable mountain of feedback, and I don't think there's anything the web team could have done about it.

It doesn't help that a lot of the stakeholders have different values and goals. I would personally be happy if the Rust home page used zero web fonts and one image, because I care a lot about performance. Obviously, the core team cares more about having an Enterprise-Friendly appearance, with the idea that non-MBA-types are going to discover Rust through other resources anyway. Since this comes down to having different goals for the project (I want a console page for finding other Rust pages, while they want a brochure), we'd never agree even if we were omniscient Homos Economi (which, of course, we're not).

Repeatedly telling them "you should get rid of the web fonts, and I don't care about your branding" is not going to change that. All we can do is try to fix blatant bugs and broken links, which, since this is a beta and not an RFC, was probably the original goal.

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My issue is not so much about color choices, specifically. It is important that designers adhere to UX standards and choose the complimentary colors that fit together, and won't cause issue with those with color blindness.

Though it is even more important that colors aren't excessively abused -- six colors on each page is one of the worst UX mistakes. Less design is often better than more. Perfection is achieved when you've eliminated as much design as possible. It's difficult to fault a website with a minimalistic design that chooses three or less color choices. Gradients of the same color are okay.

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I just wanted to ask this again, as I think it may have been buried in my comment when in fact it’s my main question. I don’t want to inject any more heat into the Issues where enough is already trying to be coordinated, but I really want to understand the specific reasons this was decided as it was.

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Here's one take: I think it's reasonable to say there's no 'one way to Rust', but then does that mean there's one sample per area of interest? Maybe we just chose an arbitrary code sample, but what are we trying to achieve with it at that point - show syntax/a tiny subset of features?

The fireflower problem proposes quite a different perspective - thinking about the 'what' rather than the 'how', hence the prominent links to the different areas. Those pages then do have code samples where appropriate (e.g. CLI and networking).

Personal note 1: I kinda like seeing language syntax on webpages. But I far more like the idea of seeing an interesting 'what' and being taken into a funnel that shows code relevant to me. (and if I'm really honest with myself, how important is it to see language syntax immediately immediately?)

Personal note 2: I meet a lot of highly technical and competent people who have either never heard of Rust, or say "seems kinda cool but nobody uses it right?" - when I talk about Yelp, Dropbox etc, they're very surprised! A lot of these people are in technical management, which often means a) they don't code as much as when they were developers and b) they have influence over programming language usage in a company. The new website clearly outlines what Rust is good for, and emphasises it's a language people are taking seriously, both important factors for this kind of person that the previous website didn't touch on at all.

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