I really like the new design. The old site was certainly showing its age--very dense and hard to navigate. Never mind the lovely 1990s motif. This is far more welcoming and user-friendly, especially to those who might be curious about Haskell.
It's exciting to witness Haskell gain traction within industry. Facebook announced last week that its building an entirely new Haskell team to focus on distributed systems, data mining, and machine learning. They're also hiring for a second team to support Haxl [1].
For those eager to use Haskell in the workplace, I imagine the new design should make it easier to formulate a compelling business case. Being able to point your project manager and/or colleagues to a website that clearly explains what Haskell is--and what sets it apart--is a big plus.
The source code for the site can be found on GitHub [2]. Awesome work by Chris Done, who kicked this off last year; see his blog post about the motivation for the new site [3].
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2useoq/haskell_oppo...
This new, awesome site is using the framework Yesod[0], which is kinda like the Rails of the Haskell world, only it can do rad stuff like prevent XSS and 404s at compile time. Yes, you read that right.
Interestingly, my love for Haskell was re-kindled today and I went to the site to download the latest platform. There is so much wrong with the new site -
1. Earlier, there was a lot of information on the Home Page. Now there's almost nothing. Yes the earlier page was a bit too busy, but crucially comprised simple HTML links and was fast to load. 2. Now there's a big banner saying "Open Source Community Effort for 20 Years" with Vimeo links, which itself is a bad idea. What happened to simple HTML anymore? Anyway, I don't care about the effort - show me the results e.g. Hackage, Hoogle, IDEs, etc. all of which was readily available in the old page but not anymore. 3. Earlier, it was easy to locate the Haskell platform for Windows. Now it takes to a cryptic download page and I am not sure what I am downloading. What is MinGHC?
These are just my initial impressions. Anyway, I wonder why people don't realize that not everything needs to be converted to the "modern web". Sometimes the old web is vastly superior to any modern alternatives.
I don't understand why they want to use this code
primes = sieve [2..] where sieve (p:xs) = p : sieve [x | x <- xs, x `mod` p /= 0]
As their first example of Haskell. It's a prime generator based on trial division. And not even trial division up to sqrt of the number you test, but all the way up.
I like the idea of a small snippet showing of the power of haskell, but there are many much better examples imho. Perhaps the website could just choose one at random at each load?
The new web site looks better than the old one but it also makes everything harder: finding documentation, downloading the compiler, explaining the environment and tool chain, etc... All these very important tasks are now hidden behind links to links to links.
I wouldn't be surprised that the average time that users spend on haskell.org goes down as a result (assuming the Haskell team even cares about measuring these things).
I'm glad the page is getting a design refresh, as it needed it, however it may have swung too far in the direction of the latest web scripting language du jour. The 'try it now' box is appealing to the short attention span scripter and not to the engineer. Already you are having to mention IO actions which is a subject that can't be properly explained through a web form.
As for the image, I don't know why it would be interesting to see a picture of a bunch of people at a conference, especially if you go back to the page frequently. Why not some original Haskell art like the Diagrams factoring image?
Regarding the 20 years in development, I agree this fact should be front and center, this is a serious tool that has had a lot of work by very high level thinkers, it is a world away from the origins of Java as far as engineering integrity.
It looks good, but they have to get rid of the out of focus photo. Photos that are entirely out of focus are really annoying and give a lot of people headaches.
Usually out of focus areas should be used to bring the eye to an object in the photo that is in focus. But if such an object does not exist, then the eye wanders and tries to adjust itself to focus (the eye has its own focusing mechanism). But of course it cannot do so, so what you get as a result is strain on the eye and a headache.
Out of focus photos have no business in what hopes to be a mainstream website.
λ do line <- getLine; putStrLn line
> л
mueval-core: Imports.hs: removeLink: does not exist (No such file or directory) ExitFailure 1
What did I do wrong?
If I go to downloads for Windows, I get the opportunity to download an installer for something called MinGHC with no indication of what version it is, and no indication if it is a 32 or 64 bit GHC. Whichever it is, if I want the other one, I'm apparently out of luck.
The Haskell Platform is nowhere to be seen, why?
It looks nice on the surface, but the actual content needs work. And the link to more content is well-hidden at the absolute bottom of the page.
great! I love the fact that "try it" takes center stage. Though there was a lot more information on the old site, I feel the new one does good job of breaking it up into more meaningfully grouped segments.
The sponsors section is confusing to me though, are these actual sponsors or just services that haskell.org uses? Its not actually clear to me based on the text and the relative prominence each is given.
This is a step backwards imho. The fit and finish of this site betrays much about the language and its amazing community.
This feels amateurish, with enough people complaining about the interactive repl and lacking information, this should have gone through more iterations and feedback loops with people outside the Haskell community.
Out of curiosity:
Who has written Haskell & deployed to production in the last 24h and if yes for what kind of app?
I started the tutorial. Then I got stuck in the second step - Let's try something completely different. Type in your name like this: "chris".
The problem is: the input box doesn't get the quotes I write on my Mac. I tried double (") and single (') quotes
I found a bug in the tutorial that introduces map.
Typing in: map(+1) [1..5] won't advance to the next step (even though the interpreter handles it fine), but map (+1) [1..5] will (note the space after map).
The old site moved to https://wiki.haskell.org
Looks neat, although I don't feel it's some big news. But there's some new weird font in "Haskell" logo now, isn't it?
Anyways, I'll always remember that cute cherry-flower (I guess) background on the old front page. It was nice first impression somehow.
It's a good start to make people want to try it out, but I feel the tutorial could go a bit further.. chaining functions together? defining functions? map functions and branching?
This appears to be broken in my browser. Screenshot: http://m.imgur.com/uXcS2ZS
Rakspace logo that appear on the footer should be light or white version, so it can match with the footer background
This redesign appears to take the position: the first page on haskell.org is for people who are brand new to the language, not for people who are already learning the language or currently use the language. I don't like that choice. I think the page should be trying to be the most useful for users of the language with a link to an About or Getting Started page that is geared toward new users. To me, a user of the language visits the site dozens or hundreds of times over the course of a career, while the average brand new user only visits it (I'm guessing here) 1.1 times. But I can appreciate the difference of opinion and priorities and from the creator's perspective I think the page does an ok job.
It makes me wonder though, what if news.ycombinator.com took that position. What if it were a page describing what Hacker News is, how posting and commenting and voting works, and how long the community had been around, etc. And then there were a link in a menu that said "Submissions" that took you to the actual content.
For someone currently learning the language (past the first 5 minutes) or that uses the language regularly, the only useful things on this front page are the four links along the top.
As for improvements, I think some sections (e.g. community banner) should be removed. I think the videos should, given the focus on brand new users, probably be removed too. The community banner is, I believe, only there to facilitate displaying the titles when people click on the videos. I haven't watched any of the videos, but from their titles I am skeptical that they should be watched before the next section (Features) is read, so they should, at a minimum, be moved further down the page. I don't like the alternating dark/light sections, so moving them further down would give you a more traditional dark header, light content, dark footer look.
I assume the videos are not going to change regularly, because they appear to all be from a single Vimeo account that has more recent videos than those that are displayed. If the videos are kept, I think the titles should be visible without clicking on the video, because I thought (which means some others will think) that clicking on the video would start playing it. Hovering one by one to see the title is not a good solution.
Congrats to the people who built and deployed this, I'm sure it took a long time to get it live (since I remember seeing this page hosted elsewhere many months ago).
The 'Click to expand' below each feature could be changed to 'Read more'.
Small thing but the favicon should be updated to look crisp on retina displays.
Dam this is cool.
Nice new design!
"advanced" purely-functional. Does -advanced- actually means something?.
"Hi there, [name]! That's a pretty name. Honest. You're getting the hang of this!"
I fear that this style of childish and somewhat condescending tutorial content is becoming fashionable. Was it the best fit for the audience?
I'm new to Haskell, and I like this page. So, wanting to get a feel for it, I tried typing the sieve example from the top of the page into the "Type Haskell expressions in here." box right beneath it.
First, I got
Hm so apparently definitions aren't expressions? Or something?I decided to remove the `primes = ` part, which made my browser really slow and had no result. I'm assuming it was computing all primes in the background.
Now, of course, maybe I should try to understand the sieve example before running it, but isn't the whole point of having a REPL box on the front page that you can facilitate people who learn the other way around? It would be great if there'd be some code or expressions available at my fingertips that would actually work in that REPL.
In other words, maybe make the first example be something that actually terminates?
Please read this as constructive criticism, which is how it is intended.
EDIT: Only now I'm noticing that exactly the things I ask for are listed to the right of the "try" box. Pardon my lazy reading, I'm really enjoying the tutorial right now. Still, making the `sieve` example terminate would be nice. But I believe my nitpick is maybe a bit much of a nitpick now.