Xah Lee, 2011-06-17
was just putting my rant on my website, here: Programing Language: The Glory of Lisp's cons.
in the process, i made a link to the logo for Qi lisp the language: Qi Language Logo, and tried to revisit Qi's home page.
Mark Tarver, a great computer scientist, is really a lousy marketer. Of the few annoucement he made here (comp.lang.lisp) about his project, often, the links are broken, or the video file not playbale, etc. While i was visiting Qi's home page today, here: http://www.lambdassociates.org/ first thing is that the “The Shen Project” link is a broken link 〔 http://www.lambdassociates.org/Shen/index.htm 〕. C'mon, that's first link on the home page.
also, if you google “qilang”, you get this page at Google: 〔 http://code.google.com/p/qilang/ 〕 that's a project with dead activity! No explanation on current status neither.
Second top link is 〔 https://www.ohloh.net/p/qilang 〕. Also, it's not clear it's a mirror, or abandoned site, or whatnot.
The rest links on the result page is unrelated.
The Qi home page of “lambdassociates.org” is not on the first page of search results!
i understand that we are all busy, and sometimes a few broken link or page with outdated info are inevitable, but this is just too much.
(if you Google “qi lang” (2 separate words), the result is worse. The first page has nothing related to computer, except 1 old blog i wrote about qi.)
compare another new lisp derivative lang the successful Clojure's website http://clojure.org/. You can see the huge difference.
It's not about marketing per se, but a minimum caretaking of presentation.
Qi really should have a dedicated domain name. qi, qilang, sheng (.org or .com). A dedicated domain is just $10 bucks a year. Web hosting is about $5 a month. So that couldn't be much. The site design is really bad too. it's like 1990s personal home page, which it really actually is. Am curious at the moment, so i took a look at the source code:
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage Express 2.0">
LOL! That's a laymen's product for writing html, and has been obsolete for like, 10 years?
PS am more than happy to be a webmaster of whatever help i can do. At least fix up broken links. There are lots tools to check for dead links … and lots of SEO stuff one can easily do. At least you want the page to come up when people search for Qi, qilang, or “qi lang”
For those curious, Dr Mark Tarver has here a page describing Sheng the language: The Shen Project: a personal appeal by Dr Mark TarverSource www.lambdassociates.org if you are a programer with a day job, a small donation i think is proper.
Xah