Hi all,
I’d heard about Odin maybe a year or two ago in some comments on HN. At the time, I didn’t look closer at it because from a glance at the home page it appeared to be complicated, or functional, or maybe academic.
Only just yesterday I took a closer look at it. It appears quite a bit different than I’d previously assumed! I’m now excited to learn Odin, and just bought Karl’s book. Here’s two things I think that would make a big difference in potential user’s first impression of Odin:
-
The homepage should say “small simple imperative procedural language” somewhere at the top in large bold letters. The faq contains numerous mentions of “simplicity”, “minimal”, “orthogonal”, “clarity”, and “entire language specification should be possible to be memorized by a mere mortal”. I love that. The overview also mentions, “explicitness and simplicity”. But the homepage, alas, instead says, “data-oriented” with “distinct typing” (not sure what those specifically mean).
-
The little box of sample code on the homepage:
- is too tiny,
- the background is too dark for the page (I read the website with the default white-backgrond css),
- it’s not obvious that there’s more than one code sample,
- the code sample at the top (“hellope”) contains formidable terms like “proc”, “accumulator”, and “token”.
- Re. the other samples: I’m not sure what “Array programming” means (maybe just using arrays?). I don’t know what SOA types are.
The fix for the code sample box on the homepage:
- make it much wider, and much taller
- lighten its background a little (maybe something closer to #4e4e4e)
- if applicable, show the output of the code sample as well
- instead of a drop-down select widget, have all-visible clickable tabs to quickly flip through the available samples
- make the first code sample a simple one.
- make one showing use of arrays
- make one showing use of maps
- make one that shows use of raylib
I think these two changes to the homepage would be valuable.