Hacker News Reader

Comment by laureny | Hacker News Reader

> Sorry, we just wanted to give the background to the project and why in the post, rather than focussing too heavily on code.

Your landing page should contain what your users want to see, not what you want to put there. You might be excited about the motivation behind your project but nobody cares, really.

I clicked on the link and I spent ten minutes reading a wall of text hoping to find good reasons why I should switch from Angular, Backbone or Ember. Instead, I just closed the window without knowing anything about your framework.

> There's plenty of API docs for the core components

Still not a substitute for a user manual, even tiny.

View on HN

A little harsh, don't you think? The link is to a blog post - not a landing page - and it seems to me it can contain whatever the author wanted it to. The post wasn't submitted here by anyone from &yet, but by Jeremy Ashkenas (the creator of Backbone which is partly the basis for ampersand).

The actual landing page is http://ampersandjs.com (linked in the first sentence of the blog post) and has plenty of technical content like the user manual/guides you wanted (http://ampersandjs.com/learn) and api docs (http://ampersandjs.com/docs).

Yes, you're right, I apologize for being a bit harsh.

But the landing page doesn't say much as well. The first section is "Why?," and the only "what" is "Ampersand.js is a well-defined approach to combining (get it?) a series of intentionally tiny modules."

I don't know what that means, and the reasons for it are "simplicity of tiny modules and npm dependency," which are not exactly convincing by itself, as I can do that just fine with plain Browserify. Then, going to the "Learn" page I get my hands busy.. with something I know nothing about.

This is heavily marketed towards Backbone users, I'm guessing.

Yea that's fair enough. This is an initial release so I'm sure they are reading these comments and working to improve their site/docs/etc.

You're right that it's basically for Backbone users:

> We <3 Backbone.js at &yet. It’s brilliantly simple and solves many common problems in developing clientside applications.

> But we missed the focused simplicity of tiny modules in node-land.

Read as: "This is like Backbone.js (almost a forked Backbone.js) but better." (better from some perspective, at least)

> You might be excited about the motivation behind your project but nobody cares, really.

Yes we'll try and improve the content on the homepage to make it more focussed. Though I guarantee if we didn't talk about the motivation we'd have people saying "why did you make another framework?!"

> Still not a substitute for a user manual, even tiny.

I'm not suggesting we've got it perfect by any stretch, but I'm not sure exactly what you're hoping to see? There's also http://ampersandjs.com/learn with some more detail around the various pieces.

>Your landing page should contain what your users want to see, not what you want to put there.

Were does the entitlement come from?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com