ideas for the web site

[Julian Graham]

Hey all,

As part of preparing for the upcoming release, I thought it would be a
good idea to review the contents of the Guile web site at gnu.org.
Here are some initial thoughts I had, in no particular order:

The "What is Guile?" page should be what
http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/ gives you, not the "Recent news"
page.

The first section should spell out what Guile stands for and play up
the fact that it's the "official" extension language for the GNU
project.  This section shouldn't list all those non-Guile-using
projects that are extensible via a scripting language.  While these
projects might serve as examples of the benefits of extension
languages, their presence on the page is confusing, since it leads the
reader to assume that those projects use Guile -- and then it's a bit
disappointing when you realize that they don't (yet).  Instead, why
don't we list some prominent Guile-using GNU projects like TeXmacs,
GnuCash, and LilyPond? And let's ditch the links to Perl and PHP.
They needlessly direct attention away from Guile.

In the "Guile is a programming language" section, we should go into a
bit more detail about what "Guile Scheme" actually is -- R5RS- and
R6RS-compatible, with some implementation-specific features those
standards don't require, like easy integration with C code, GOOPS, and
a large set of useful modules.  Let's emphasize that Guile is a modern
Scheme implementation and tracks current standards, because that is
actually the case now; we can do this by using terminology that users
in the Scheme community will recognize (R6RS, SRFIs, hygienic macros,
etc.).  This would also be a good place to mention the web client /
server modules Andy's been working on.  The ability to interact with
systems over the web is, for better or for worse, a requirement for a
language's standard library these days, so we should point out that
Guile can do it.

We should add a new section after that one with a heading like "Guile
is a platform for extension languages," which briefly describes the VM
and compiler, as well as Guile's support for other programming
languages -- particularly ECMAScript, which will turn heads, and Emacs
Lisp.  This might be a good place to play up the work that's being
done on supporting additional languages, like Lua, if that's far
enough long yet.

Let's edit down the section called "The true cost of doing it
yourself" or discard it completely.  As above, I don't think it's
necessary to mention or link to other languages on the front page.
The argument for extension languages is probably familiar to
application developers these days; the points about complexity are a
bit murkier now that Guile has a greatly expanded its feature set.

Would it make sense to move the "Getting Guile" section to its own
page linked from the sidebar?  That way there'd be a space for
information that's too important to only be in the manual but not
important enough to be on the front page, like supported platforms,
distributions known to package Guile, and direct links to the latest
releases in each of the 1.6.x, 1.8.x, and 2.0.x series.

Let's add a pointer on the sidebar (under the link to the mailing
lists) to the Freenode IRC channel, since that's pretty active these
days.

Thoughts?


Regards,
Julian