It would be nice to have a blogpost-sized introduction to Hylo that we can link on the front page of the website.

(Exact button titles are open to improvement ideas)

The introduction of Austral was really nice: https://borretti.me/article/introducing-austral

Some other young programming language websites:

• https://vale.dev/
• https://www.roc-lang.org/
• https://odin-lang.org/
• Rust, with a very different design: https://rust-lang.org/

To make people feel belonging to the community, it can be nice to include the origin story.

Furthermore, maybe we could briefly introduce the core team: we have researchers, C++ standard contributors, library authors from the industry, a recent graduate with web development background, so a great diversity of opinions and ideas.

While the concrete use cases of where Hylo wants to be successful first are not yet established (apart from being a great systems programming language), our values are driving us already. My informal notes about those were the following: (you don't need to stick with this set, the last one may be slightly less important)

1. Curiosity and Research
   Explore SOTA ideas, techniques, learn from latest research and push the boundaries of current knowledge. Question assumptions, experiment boldly, and value learning. If challenged with an established problem or task, talk with experts in that field. (TODO rephrase)

2. Collaboration over Competition
   We believe that working together instead of against our competitors leads to better outcomes for everyone. Making languages is not a zero-sum game. While developing Hylo, we learn from Swift, Rust, C++, Odin among many others, and we contribute back with bug reports, patches, research findings, and authoring libraries that we developed either for research purposes or for the development of the compiler. By sharing early and helping each other, we can receive feedback and improve our work quicker than if we worked in isolation. It’s best if we keep the world’s success > community success > personal success. Generosity will circle back and result in advancing the latter ones.

3. Inclusivity and Respect
   Making a language successful requires diverse perspectives and experiences. Domain experts tend to have blind spots in areas outside their expertise, thus it’s crucial to listen to a wide range of voices both during language design and community building with respect. We strive to create an environment where everyone feels welcome and valued, regardless of their technical background.

It can be great mentioning that there has been multiple university collaborations, and link to our relevant page for more information about the open project topics /docs/contributing/university-collab/.

If somebody didn't know about the value of value semantics and local reasoning before, they should see the motivation and feel that they have learnt something valuable from this article (rather than just feeling that we just try to show off). After reading this, the call to actions could be reading the Language Tour, joining the slack/github discussions community, or learn how they can contribute to the project. The contribution guide will be available here: /docs/contributing

Everything I wrote above can be taken with a great pinch of salt, they are just my ideas, so feel free to diverge if needed.

If you need to include code snippets or other fancy visuals, I recommend checking out Editing this Documentation | Hylo, or the full set of available Starlight Components. We can also make new HTML components in a .astro file, if some interactive visualization would be useful. E.g. visualizing scopes/lifetimes, step by step execution of a subscript, etc.. Anyways, during writing don't worry about these, you can have some simple code blocks with comments repeated multiple times.

You can write the content inside https://github.com/hylo-lang/hylo-website/blob/main/src/pages/vision.mdx. There are setup instructions in the readme, there shouldn't be anything special required to building the project apart from nodejs and pnpm.