Website message overhaul, pass 2

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Sunday, November 20, 2011 02:40:09 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Thanks to all who provided feedback! I read again the entire thread,
> then made one more pass:
> 
> http://d-programming-language.org/new/
> 
> I didn't make technical/aesthetic changes (JS/noJS, placement of news,
> links to secondary pages etc) so when providing additional feedback
> please focus on the core message.
> 
> There are significant changes of content: some keywords are different,
> text is shorter, no more "community" section (probably it'll go on a
> different page).
> 
> There's a prominent example at the top. I'm thinking to rotate that
> randomly, and pick examples out of an always-running contest.

Overall. It looks good. It's also more compact, which is probably a good 
thing. One thing that bothered me right off the bat though is "modeling power" 
in that my first reaction is "what kind of modeling power?" It feels to me like 
it needs an adjective in front of it. It's probably fine though - particularly 
since I can't think of what to put in front of it (high?). The thought behind 
it is solid, but I guess that the phrase is just a bit odd to me.

Nitpick: "giving the best of the static and dynamic worlds" would be slightly 
better IMHO as "giving the best of both the static and the dynamic worlds."

Nitpick: The + on the Example link is a nice improvement, but ideally it would 
change to a - when the example is visible. That might be more complicated than 
it's worth though. I don't know (since I'm not a web programmer).

Nitpick: "Best paradigm is to not impose..." sounds odd. Do you mean "The best 
paradigm..." or something else? Maybe it should be something more like "It is 
best to not impose one programming paradigm at the expense of others."

Suggestion: Make RAII in the text a link to RAII on wikipedia. Also, scope 
should probably be turned into a link to scope statements in the documenation.

I really like the idea of having the prominent example rotate randomly from a 
list somewhere, but of course, that means that we need to come up with such a 
list, and coming up with good, concise examples like that generally seems to 
be difficult. If we can come up with even just a few though, it would still be a 
nice touch over having one, static example.

I find it interesting that whatever you did with the news section this time 
around actually shows up properly in Konqueror, whereas before it didn't 
(Konqueror is generally quite standards compliant, but that doesn't always 
translate to showing stuff correctly - especially with advanced web 2.0 kind of 
stuff).

Overall, it looks good to me. But from the previous comments, I think that 
others are far pickier than I am about the content (e.g. multi-paradigm was 
fine with me).

- Jonathan M Davis