On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 1:02 PM, Seth Johnson <[email protected]>wrote:
Just know that you're back to lots of points, not a message and an > illustration of that message. Yes, the first words of the home page and the tutorial can be improved. I'll revise both today. However, I don't believe for a minute that this will have any real impact on Leo's popularity, for the following reasons: 1. The content of Leo's tutorials is, to the first approximation, the only thing that matters. The new content is *much* better than the old, and that *will* make a difference. 2. Leo's home page is particularly problematic. It's *way* too short to do more than tease. Yes, the home page should have two or three introductory sentences about benefits. I'm on it. However, without bullet lists of actual features, those sentences will seem like hot air. 3. People don't use Emacs and vim because they have read the tutorials, they read their tutorials because a) they are expected to use Emacs or vim or b) because they have heard about Emacs and vim from other sources. Generations of new programmers are taught Emacs. I don't remember how I learned about Python, but surely I went to Python's home page *after* I (somehow!) became aware of it. Consider the opening words from the Python and Emacs home pages and tutorials. As you will see, these words have absolutely no chance, by themselves, of getting anyone excited about anything. They are *not* why Python and Emacs are popular. Python home page: http://www.python.org/ Python is a programming language that lets you work more quickly and integrate your systems more effectively. You can learn to use Python and see almost immediate gains in productivity and lower maintenance costs. Python tutorial: http://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/ Python is an easy to learn, powerful programming language. It has efficient high-level data structures and a simple but effective approach to object-oriented programming. Python’s elegant syntax and dynamic typing, together with its interpreted nature, make it an ideal language for scripting and rapid application development in many areas on most platforms. Emacs home page: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_programming_language>with extensions to support text editing. The features of GNU Emacs include: [bullet list omitted] Emacs tutorial: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/index.html Emacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor. This manual describes how to edit with Emacs and some of the ways to customize it; it corresponds to GNU Emacs version 24.3. Most popular googled Emacs tutorial: http://www2.lib.uchicago.edu/keith/tcl-course/emacs-tutorial.html What GNU Emacs Is GNU Emacs is a free, portable, extensible text editor. That it is free means specifically that the source code is freely copyable and redistributable. That it is portable means that it runs on many machines under many different operating systems, so that you can probably count on being able to use the same editor no matter what machine you're using. That it is extensible means that you can not only customize all aspects of its usage (from key bindings through fonts, colors, windows, mousage and menus), but you can program Emacs to do entirely new things that its designers never thought of. To summarize: I'll spend a bit more time on the first words on Leo's home page and in the tutorial, but imo this is just a stylistic tweak. Rather than agonize over every little comma in Leo's documentation stack, there *is* something that could have a major impact on Leo's popularity. I'll discuss this in a new thread. Edward -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
