Re: First draft of the Emacs website

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2015 18:26:16 -0500
> From: John Yates <address@hidden>
> Cc: Emacs developers <address@hidden>
> 
> You and I are old "grey beards". My point was that mentioning things that we -
> as seasoned users of Emacs - like is quite a bit different from imagining the
> website as a sales pitch to someone who has not used Emacs but _might_ - given
> an appropriate message - be coaxed into trying it. If you accept such 
> messaging
> as the site's first goal then you have to try to put yourself in the mindset 
> of
> such a viewer.
> 
> Your comments suggest that perhaps you do not buy into that being the first
> goal.

FWIW, I don't think there should be "the goal", in singular, for such
a Web site.  The stuff there should try to target diverse interests,
and let everyone pick up what they are most interested in.  Trying to
target some virtual newbie, and pretend we know very well what will
turn them on or off is bound to break at some point, IMO.

For example, the GDB front-end might very well interest someone who
needs to debug C/C++/Fortran code on GNU/Linux, where there's no
alternative, at least not out of the box, that is better.  I remember
showing that UI (when it was still not the default one) to several
developers that came from VS, and they never wanted anything else ever
since.  So mentioning it doesn't sound such a silly idea to me, after
all.

I believe the same could be true with other aspects.  E.g., is it such
a preposterous assumption that someone might be interested in coding
in Lisp, instead of all the ad-hoc extension languages invented by
other editors?

In sum, it might be TRT to diversify a bit.