expand intro with concrete examples

[brasswood]

Creating a PR to get buy-in from others

[bhargavkulk]

missing GPU stuff for Ganesh

[bhargavkulk]

also not sure if we want to say "use PL theory". while i agree we do, it has a certain connotation that distracts from "pragmatism"

[bhargavkulk]

also just lone LLVM sounds weird. even the old "LLVM compiler infrastructure" sounded weird. I think we need to restructure/completel change the last 2 sentences. Ill try coming up with alternatives.

[MitchBriles]

Maybe "the LLVM project" since we have folks working with MLIR, etc.

[bhargavkulk]

this maybe unrelated to the main blurb but also might be, but Pavel said we should name drop the main projects that the lab is known for like Herbie, Racket, Alive2 etc... The main reasons why anyone would visit the website in the main place.

[bhargavkulk]

this is also opposed to links to all projects that spawn from the lab, as most research projects will bit-rot and die, except for these main ones.

[bhargavkulk]

I think we should rethink the sentences after the first one.

[bhargavkulk]

The Cornell PL group (^) does this

[brasswood]

FYI before we merge this, we should probably squash it.

[pavpanchekha]

I would cut if possible. Listing both C-Smith and X-Smith for example... it sounds like maybe neither is maintained? C-Reduce or C-Vise or neither? Also, just write less text! People are not going to the web page to read! I'm not sure how much that second paragraph adds for any actual visitors!

[brasswood]

I think the text is already pretty lean. And I think the second paragraph does serve a purpose: it mentions interests in GPU programming and gradual typing, which are not represented by the projects from the first paragraph.

Re C-Smith, X-Smith, C-Reduce, C-Vise not being actively maintained: The phrase I used is, "we are founding contributors to...". Do we want to just list projects that are actively being maintained, and if so, wouldn't that just be Herbie, Racket, and Alive2? I personally think big projects we helped found are worth bragging about, even if they're no longer actively maintained--Cornell, for example, lists Cyclone on their page.

[pavpanchekha]

Well, I'm not gonna micro-manage y'all's website but it would help to have a clear answer to, who is the visitor, and why are they on the web page. What are our goals for the web page.

I continue to think that the #1 biggest issue on the web page is that the photos load too slowly, and the #2 issue is that some of the photos are bad, and maybe #3 is that the page looks a bit bland, branding-wise, and flavor text at the top is way down the list.

[bhargavkulk]

@pavpanchekha all pictures have been cropped