| I'm CEO of WSO2 and we are working on a programming language for writing microservices called 'Ballerina', and we host it's community at http://ballerina.io. Prior to the first public launch, I pulled 9 of our core community members into an offsite where we developed and implemented the web site. It was a challenging exercise and so can relate to Rust's community efforts to the redesign. I wanted to offer some perspectives of what Rust's challenges must be. 1. It is really hard to capture the value proposition for a programming language. While working through Ballerina, there is a hard balance between a) describing the language design, b) explaining why language elements are valuable, c) describe the key types of programming workloads that most benefit from your language philosophy, d) direct those interested to learn more to the right information, efficiently. 2. As such, whomever is leading the Rust site evolution over the years shows a real touch and depth for messaging. It takes a lot of insight and careful observation to your community over an extended period of time to tease out which elements are fundamentally what is driving your audience. Having said this, I have a tendency to feel that the messaging in the latest version might be creating a messaging abstraction trying to appeal to a wider developer base vs. the messaging in the current site which is more strongly appealing to existing system developers. Is this a conscious choice of the Rust team? 3. The rust team has figured out, through years of promotion, that the first (and last) question language teams get is always about "who's using the language? how big is the community?". The hardest part about birthing a language is the chicken and egg problem - someone needs to be the first big production app. Dogfooding is really the only way. Rust takes this head on. I am not a big design person, so don't have an opinion about whether the minimalistic design is better than the new flowing design. A lot of the design influences for ballerina.io came from Go and Rust lang's web site - we are fans! So, I guess you could say that we prefer the minimalism concept. |
What I really think Rust needs to grab a wide audience is an out of the box just works IDE. Also too many libraries require nightly, which is a nightmare for a business that must have stable code for deployment.
Edit: They previous had their value proposition as their slogan. It needed work for directing, i.e. don't talk about what Rust does, talk about what Rust does for you. They took it out and replaced it with a mostly meaningless catchphrase. That doesn't actually address the problem with their old slogan.
The most damning thing about the redesign is where did the link to the documentation go? All the most important stuff for people actually using the language got buried.