[Ur] New website?

[Adam Chlipala]

OK, here are my belated replies throughout this thread, combined into 
one message!  I'll start with my overall conclusions and then give 
replies to individual messages, all concatenated below.

I would be quite happy to reconceptualize the Ur project site as a 
community project.  For me to it would be ideal for a set of non-me 
volunteers to handle both the design and the hosting.  It would probably 
be best for me to register a domain for the site (the impredicative.com 
part hasn't seemed like a good fit for a while) but point hostnames as 
directed by volunteers.

So, the big question: who would be interested in taking charge of some 
substantial part of that kind of community effort?

All of that might make sense to do simultaneously with a switch to 
GitHub, or maybe the GitHub switch deserves to come earlier.  One task 
that makes sense to tackle concurrently with a GitHub switch is a 
redesign of the Ur/Web extended standard library, which currently is 
split across several Mercurial repositories.  Any thoughts on whether it 
would be better to have one Git repository for all of the extended 
standard-library content listed as "Officially Blessed" here?
     http://www.impredicative.com/ur/libraries.html
Would it make sense to maintain separate Git repos for all of them, but 
maybe also provide one repo that includes all the others as submodules?  
(I'm also thinking of removing the gui and meta libraries in favor of 
migration of appropriate code into UPO.)

On 07/28/2015 04:54 PM, Torstein Saltvedt wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 7:32 PM, Adam Chlipala <adamc at csail.mit.edu 
> <mailto:adamc at csail.mit.edu>> wrote:
>
>     Thanks to everyone for their thoughts on the project web site.
>     Here's my summary of the 5-ish opinions expressed:
>     - It's not clear that the large background graphic from Torstein's
>     design is the way to go.  Somehow it may be out of keeping with
>     the "character" of the Ur/Web project.
>
>
> Aesthetics are subjective, and although I think the current site looks 
> outdated, it's only one of the reasons for the redesign and arguably 
> the least important one.

Those are definitely some compelling reasons (not quoted here)! 
Unfortunately, they draw largely on web-design knowledge that I haven't 
bothered to develop myself.  But the plan above can help get around that 
problem.
>
>     - Moving to Git & GitHub also seems like a no-brainer.  One
>     concern about GitHub was expressed, regarding censorship.  I
>     personally am not too worried there, as it's easy to maintain
>     "mirrors" of a Git repository all over the place, to be ready in
>     case one main provider goes over to the dark side.  The pros seem
>     to outweigh the cons, considering how many potential contributors
>     already have GitHub accounts and are used to using GitHub.
>
>
> Does this mean that the project will adapt the GitHub Wiki, Issue 
> tracker and the Pull Request model as well? Will you still accept 
> patches through this mailing list?

Yes, I'm suggesting normalizing the Ur/Web community process to be the 
standard GitHub one, which I think then replaces all of the current 
infrastructure beyond the mailing list and the general web presence 
(including demos & documentation).
>
>     On 07/27/2015 08:30 PM, Stefan Scott Alexander wrote:
>
>         Also, "eating your own dog food" would probably be a plus. It
>         only makes sense that a website for a web programming language
>         should be programmed in the language itself.
>
>
>     I'm not sure about this one.  Ur/Web is for web _apps_, not web
>     _sites_, so it may be a mismatch for a largely static site.
>
>
> Agreed, but it would still make for a great demo.

Right, so, for that reason, I could see being convinced that it's a good 
idea.

On 07/28/2015 05:59 PM, Sergey Mironov wrote:
> 2015-07-28 20:18 GMT+03:00 Adam Chlipala <adamc at csail.mit.edu>:
>> Sergey, anyone else out there: might I be able to interest you in
>> implementing and/or hosting such a service?  I would be very happy to link
>> to it prominently from the Ur project site!
> I am quite busy at the moment. Probably, I'll have some time next
> month to address the problem if nobody wants to do it.
>
> For inspiration, one may checkout my old half-done project
> urweb-pastebin.

Neat, thanks.  One other person indicated interest in building a 
prototype system some time soon, and your code may indeed be helpful as 
a starting point.

On 07/28/2015 10:19 PM, Timothy Beyer wrote:
> The site needs to look trendy, so things like bootstrap widgets would 
> be important in promoting Ur/Web. Plus, a menu that toggles between 
> desktop or mobile menu (ex. SmartMenus [2] with Bootstrap 3 addon [3]) 
> also looks really modern, although it might be a bit overkill for this 
> project. 

I think I'd rather replace "trendy" with "good" in your description 
above. ;)  I wouldn't mind a Bootstrap-based design, though.  I'm 
already using the Ur/Web Bootstrap library in production apps via UPO.

> Possibly a prerequisite for the above, but it would be cool if we had a webhost
> available with Ur/Web and PostgreSQL installed so that it would be easier to
> host Javascript style interactive demos.  These types of demos could really
> make a big selling point for Ur/Web, especially to newcomers and those
> skeptical of its practical uses.

Well, it's trivial to do with a Linux virtual machine, and it will be 
even more trivial once Debian and Ubuntu do stable releases that include 
the new Ur/Web packages.

I agree that it couldn't hurt to make it all easier.

> Not directly related to github, but we should implement support for 
> syntax highlighting libraries such as highlight.js (perfect for 
> webpages and markdown), pygments (for TeX/LaTeX).

I agree that it's a good thing to add Ur/Web support in as many 
supporting tools as possible!  I don't see working on it myself (I 
focused my efforts on the Emacs mode's syntax highlighting), but I'd be 
glad to accept patches into the main Ur/Web source tree.

> If we are going with github, we should also have a "Fork me on github" 
> ribbon on the top right of the page.

Yeah, sounds like a good idea.

>> Another very useful thing would be a tutorial that doesn't assume ML and
>> Haskell familiarity, ideally written by someone beside me, since
>> Ur/Web's design has been in some sense optimized for my brain. :) Any
>> takers there?
> I would like to make some tutorials at some point, although I'm curious which
> tutorials people would like to see?

Yeah, that's a good question, and it's one that I'm not so qualified to 
answer, re: my general contention that Ur/Web documentation will get 
stronger as it's increasingly written by people who didn't design the 
language, whose likely confusion points I'm especially unqualified to 
predict.

> Right now, I'm focusing on library stuff, rather than tutorials, such as GUI
> components similar to what I've used on big Javascript projects, and JSON RPC.

Can you elaborate on the JSON RPC part?  I can't think of anything of 
that kind that wasn't already well-supported by Ur/Web and its extended 
standard library 5 years ago.

On 07/30/2015 05:24 PM, Istvan Chung wrote:
> I'd like to express a somewhat late -1 vote for moving to git. Git has 
> a number of technical deficiencies compared to Mercurial. [...] All in 
> all, the main reason a project wouldn't want to use Mercurial is 
> because it has some barrier to entry due to being less well-known than 
> git. [...] The main advantages associated with GitHub are a nicer web 
> interface, issue tracking, and pull requests.

I agree that Mercurial is technically superior to Git, and I believe 
that holds true for both novice and expert users.  The reasons for 
switching to GitHub are mostly social: GitHub is now the standard 
platform for open source, and it's likely that potential Ur/Web 
contributors would be unfamiliar with Mercurial and do "cost accounting" 
that assigns responsibility for learning Mercurial to the Ur/Web 
project, which reduces their motivation to start contributing.  It's 
also true that pretty much everyone has a GitHub account by now, and it 
reduces the barrier to entry, for contributing code or reporting bugs, 
to be able to use a standard GitHub account.  Barriers to entry are also 
reduced by allowing the standard GitHub tools to be used, in place of 
others like Mantis that will also require from-scratch learning for most 
folks.  (I also think that GitHub's issue tracking is probably 
substantially superior to Mantis, just because of how much simpler the 
former interface is.)

Overall, as for the web site design, it's misleading to analyze the 
options by polling the current contributors, since there might be a much 
larger population of potential contributors who were turned away by the 
present configuration!
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