beta.python.org content

[Michael Sparks]

Kay Schluehr wrote:

> The new Python site is incredibly boring. Sorry to say this. The old
> site is/was amateurish but engaged. Now after ~15 years of existence
> Pythons looks like it wants to be popular among directors of a german
> job centers. It aims to do everything right but what could be said
> worse? The text on the beginners page tries to argue with the
> potential users in a pointless monologue. Who wants to read this text?
> Who wants to be convinced that Python is *not* slow? "Do you stop
> beating your wife?" And where is fun, irony and black humour? Why
> Python? "Python in industry" - I see chimneys of 19th century
> factories, proletarian heroes as well as futuristic hybrid robots
> superseeding humanity. "Python community" - a dutch grand-family photo
> from the beginning of the 20ths century - some ( or all? ) of the
> members are accidentally looking like Guido, "Python in science" -
> snake-like RNA strand. It need not be like this but I wonder about the
> total lack of personality.

+1

This doesn't show the vibrance of to me somewhere like Europython.
It doesn't show "Oh, and this is incredibly, cool, fun and useful". That
to me is what both http://www.turbogears.org/ and
http://www.rubyonrails.org/ do show.

RonR has 4 very simple engaging points:
   * Get Excited
   * Get Started
   * Get Better
   * Get Involved

Blindly copying something else is rarely IMO a good idea, but having
NO personality simply turns people off. I'm not sure how to fix this,
but I'd suspect starting with the visual humour style in python might
be a good place to start...

Put another way, I'd expect *python.com* [1] to look like the new site,
and *python.org* to look like something that, well, represents some of
the utter (very cool, very diverse) madness of the people involved with
python.

   [1] NB: I **really** wouldn't go to python.com, I REALLY wasn't
        expecting that.... (REALLY)


Michael.
-- 
Michael.Sparks at rd.bbc.co.uk, http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net/
British Broadcasting Corporation, Research and Development
Kingswood Warren, Surrey KT20 6NP

Totally my opinion and no-one elses and expecially not
the views of the BBC (!)