[Haskell-cafe] Logos of Other Languages

[Paulo Tanimoto]

Hi Ashley,

On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 2:10 AM, Ashley Yakeley <ashley at semantic.org> wrote:
> All of these get one thing right that the current and most of the proposed
> Haskell logos do not: they don't make any reference to the syntax of the
> language itself. Doing so seems to miss the point of a logo: it's supposed
> to appeal visually, rather than semantically. So I'd like to see some
> submissions that don't use lambdas.

I wholeheartedly agree with you, despite being guilty of charge myself
.  : )  Part of the difficulty for us is that much of Haskell's beauty
comes from abstraction, and the notation was created precisely to
capture that, right?

Before I go into some ideas, let me point to some logos that I find very cool:
http://www.lisperati.com/logo.html

Perhaps we could contact Conrad for help.


Some ideas:
* a hammock, symbolizing laziness
* a banana, borrowing from the popular paper.  I suppose lenses or
barbed wire wouldn't be as catchy.
* some blocks fitting together, a la tetris, representing the idea of
strong typing
* some plumbing, in the same vein as the previous one.  I like to
think of Haskell as a series of pipes fitting together, as opposed to
a rube goldberg machine type of flowing.
* an insect or animal: don't know which one, and I assume that beetle
in the new book is trademarked by O'Reilly.  Maybe something like
FalconNL's Monica Monad, but a little more serious.
* _|_: just as the joke, but this has the same problem as the lambda.

I suspect it would be much easier if they had decided to stick with
"Curry" as the language name.   : )

Paulo

PS: I'm CCing Conrad, I don't know if he's in this list.  Here's the
link so he knows what this is about:
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_logos/New_logo_ideas