It isn't obvious from rust-lang.org that Rust is a programming language

documentation
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Imagine you've just heard of Rust you decide to pay a visit to the new site. Amongst all the buzzwords, you find catchphrases like:

Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software

Performance • Reliability • Productivity

Rust helps you maintain your app with confidence and distribute it with ease

Use Rust to supercharge your JavaScript

it can power performance-critical services

great documentation

Build it in Rust

companies around the world are using Rust in production today for fast, low-resource, cross-platform solutions

the documentation, the tooling, the community is great - you have all the tools to succeed

Cool, but what is it? A new framework? A tool? A service?

a friendly compiler with useful error messages

Ah, so it's a programming language.

Contrast this to the old site, where it's practically the first thing you see:

Rust is a systems programming language

I'll save the complaints about the site itself for another time, but can we at least make clear the fact that Rust is a programming language without it being buried under a pile of slogans?

Sorry if this comes across as hostile. I don't intend it that way - I just want the marketing material to feel genuine.

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Sorry if this comes across as hostile.

If you're self-aware enough to realize that what you're writing might be hostile, why go through with it?

This is a space in which we all care about the Rust project, so you're not alone in that. I'd like to think that we, as a community, can be better than to publicly be hostile towards each other.

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HTML page’s <title> is “Rust programming language”. I tend to agree “programming language” should be more visible, somewhere, but I am not sure where.

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There are several people with the view that code snippets should be on the landing page, showing idiomatic Rust. If this were the case, the fact that it is a programming language should be clear?

Personally, I find the removal of the term "systems programmer" problematic, especially because there are many C/C++ programmers who know that that term applies to them, who now just think Rust is like the 10+ other shiny new applications programming languages out there that will never suit their use case.

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Re: system programming. While I agree missing that particular keyword can lose people who are looking for it, like many once useful keywords, it seems to me “system programming” also is getting watered down to meaninglessness.

In other words, “I heard Go is a system programming language, but when I looked in detail, it didn’t suit my use case. This Rust is also saying it is a system programming language, but I won’t be fooled twice! It will not suit my use case”, etc. It doesn’t matter whether Rust is using the keyword correctly, if the keyword is being destroyed in general.

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As has previously been mentioned on the blog post and elsewhere, the best place to give concrete feedback about the website is on the website issue tracker.

Happily, someone has already phrased this feedback well in an issue - https://github.com/rust-lang/www.rust-lang.org/issues/612

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Embedded/IoT is a good synonym for systems, but maybe that will get watered down too.

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Bootloader programming language?