[Haskell-cafe] Re: Against cuteness

[Benjamin L.Russell]

On Wed, 11 Mar 2009 05:17:41 -0500, Gregg Reynolds <dev at mobileink.com>
wrote:

>Regarding logos/mascots:  nothing personal folks, but I would like to cast a
>loud firm vote against all forms of cuteness, especially small furry animal
>cuteness.  It's been done half to death, and we are not O'Reilly.  Of all
>the billions of images from all the cultures in the world available to us we
>can surely find something that is witty or charming without being cute.

Sorry, but I cannot agree with you.  I actually moved from New York to
Tokyo partly because of the cuteness culture in Japan (and lack of it
in New York--everything has to be black there to be cool for some
reason), and I absolutely will not stand for any mascot that isn't
cute.

Here, there are a lot of Japanese Haskell fans who love the beauty of
Haskell, and you will risk losing a lot of them if you choose a mascot
without any cuteness factor.  A lot of my friends meet together every
month to study category theory and Haskel in a Category Theory Study
Group (see
http://www.sampou.org/cgi-bin/haskell.cgi?CategoryTheory%3A%B7%F7%CF%C0%CA%D9%B6%AF%B2%F1),
and we all love Haskell for its simplicity and beauty.  We like to
think monadically.

You can still distinguish yourself from O'Reilly without losing the
cuteness factor with a logo like one of the following:

An aqua lambda symbol superimposed on Planet Earth, representing a
Haskellian Planet Earth:
http://wikicompany.org/fs/img/haskell.png

a three-dimensional lambda^2 logo stand, with the same logo in a
transparent green upper portion an aluminum lower portion
http://home.comcast.net/~flyingsquids/BlogStuff/HL2Logo2.jpg

lambda -> theta tau, represented in Greek symbols of two colors:
http://qthaskell.sourceforge.net/

Different from anything on O'Reilly, potentially Haskellian in spirit,
and not animal mascots, but still cute.

-- Benjamin L. Russell
-- 
Benjamin L. Russell  /   DekuDekuplex at Yahoo dot com
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