[python-advocacy] How programming language webpages should be designed

[Roy Smith]

> The front page examples ought to be few and brief and ought to work
> without alteration in both 2.6 and 3.1 .
>
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It would be good if they would work in substantially older versions than
2.6.  Looking at a couple of random RedHat boxes we've got here, it looks
like AS4 shipped with 2.3 and AS3 with 2.2.  True, AS3 and AS4 aren't
current, but there's lots of those (and older) out in the field.

The use case I see is some bored sysadmin hearing about Python, going to
the web site, and saying, "OK, I'm willing to play with this a bit".  He
sees some sample code and tries it out on whatever box he happens to be on
at the moment.  If it doesn't work the first time, the most likely outcome
is he'll just move on to something else.  We've probably got an attention
span window of about 3 minutes.

I'm sure there are plenty of good examples we could come up with that work
just fine all the way back to 2.0.  Our goal is to get somebody hooked on
the language in general.  We can do that just fine with older versions.

Once we've got them liking the basic language, there's plenty of time to
show them all the improved features of newer versions.