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Larry Wall's discussion on the logo, Camelia (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/perl6/mu/master/misc/camel...):

Discussion Highlights =====================

From: Larry Wall Date: March 24, 2009 10:25 Subject: Re: Logo considerations

[...] I think there's a tendency to go way too abstract in most of these proposals. I want something with gut appeal on the order of Tux. In particular I want a logo for Perl 6 that is:

    Fun
    Cool
    Cute
    Named
    Lively
    Punable
    Personal
    Concrete
    Symmetric
    Asymmetric
    Attractive
    Relational
    Metamorphic
    Decolorizable
    Shrinkable to textual icon
    Shrinkable to graphical icon

In addition, you can extend just about anything by attaching "P6" wings to it. I also take it as a given that we want to discourage misogyny in our community. You of the masculine persuasion should consider it an opportunity to show off your sensitive side. :)

Hence, Camelia.

Larry

Happy to see someone who discourage misogyny in his wishes for a new logo :-)

I don't get it. How does disliking a butterfly logo equate to hating women?

It doesn't. The logo is more childish than it is feminine anyways.

Discouraging misogyny doesn't mean feminine.

But in this context (a rather garish butterfly logo), what does it mean?

Not overtly masculine? I can imagine the temptation was there for some to promote an overly aggressive logo.

The idea that masculinity is akin to misogyny is as dangerous and harmful as misogyny itself. As is the idea that aggression is a purely masculine trait, or that any of the traits Larry listed are exclusively feminine.

Larry didn't say it should be feminine, nor did he imply it. He also didn't say masculinity is misogyny. At most he called for something androgynous. I think to interpret his statements otherwise is projecting.

> As is the idea that aggression is a purely masculine trait

I didn't say it was a purely masculine trait, but to ignore the clear association between masculinity and aggression in many cultures is to ignore reality. There are many social, economic and (possibly) evolutionary reasons why men are often more aggressive than women. Couple this with the relative involvement of women in CS and programming positions, and I don't think it's a stretch to say that aggression in our industry can be seen as overly masculine.

He literally says his vision for the logo is to discourage misogyny in the parent post:

> I also take it as a given that we want to discourage misogyny in our community.

All I want to know is what does the one have to do with the other? What does a butterfly logo have to do with the concept of sexism towards women? That's it. That's my question. I have no idea how to state it more simply.

Someone suggested that "discouraging misogyny" does not necessarily mean femininity, so I asked what "discouraging misogyny" does mean in this context, and you replied "not overtly masculine".

That response does not simply allude to the idea that masculinity is misogyny, it is literally saying that masculinity is misogyny. Hence my reply that the very idea is itself sexist and dangerous. It was my response to your saying masculinity is misogyny, and your interpretation of Larry's original statement about the logo to mean as such. That is not projecting, that is simple reading comprehension.

> All I want to know is what does the one have to do with the other? What does a butterfly logo have to do with the concept of sexism towards women? That's it. That's my question. I have no idea how to state it more simply.

By being gender neutral and inviting in an industry with is definitively male dominated, and arguably male-centric.

> It was my response to your saying masculinity is misogyny

I did not say masculinity is misogyny, please don't extend your argument to my statements providing and alternate interpretation. My interpretation is this: You can fight misogyny by being open and inviting to all sexes. Being overtly masculine can hamper that. Let's not be overtly masculine.

To be clear, I think the root difference in our points of view is that you seem to have attributed a very specific meaning to one particular statement of his. I think there is not enough context to make a definitive assertion as to his meaning, so out of the possible interpretations I chose one that is more positive.

Since Peaches wears a Camelia suit on stage[0], I think this logo made his job.

[0] https://twitter.com/CreativeCopper1/status/65167580812206080...

Yup, shrinkable to graphical icon is an exclusively masculine trick, that's for sure.

That's pretty much the intention. I have heard Larry Wall say that Camelia was created to appeal to 7 year old girls. I didn't hear him go into any complicated discussions regarding masculinity/femininity or any of that jazz.

> You of the masculine persuasion should consider it an opportunity to show off your sensitive side. :)

I might perceive this differently because of my cultural background, but isn't it a bit misandric to claim masculinity as unsensitive?

Tom Cooks

I'm having a hard time thinking of a logo that is both

* Something a programming language with wide use would ever adopt, past, present, or future

* ..and is misogynistic in any way

What the hell is that sentence directed at?

Maybe he meant something that Peaches could make a suit of on stage: https://twitter.com/CreativeCopper1/status/65167580812206080...

I remember volunteering to create some logo ideas for Perl 6 - maybe a decade ago? I did research and presented ideas. I was at a step even before thumbnail sketches - just wanted to get some feedback from the Perl community - am I on the right track? Any other ideas to look at? [0]

Larry kinda went, "NO IT"S THIS." and there was Camelia.

Honestly, Camelia is just slightly worse than the redesign of The Life Aquatic Flag/Logo. Which itself was funny, as this was from a comedy [1].

[0] http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.users/2009/01/msg9...

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Life+Aquatic+with+Steve+...

Ah, I remember now - Larry just posted a PDF of Camelia.[0]

I was under the impression that Larry was banned from being in involved in the implementation of Perl 6. ;)

I kinda saw that logo and gave up the idea of helping. It was just so horrible as to defy logic.

Still love Perl and I think a butterfly is a great idea - and even this is a good as a start, but it's not a strong enough logo for people to have careers depend upon. Like me. It doesn't even tick all the checkboxes that Larry had. If you made this logo in an intro design class in art school, you'd be ridiculed.

[0] http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.users/2009/03/msg9...

OOC how many people would be interested in a Perl 6 Corporate Look n' Feel type site? Where everything is just designed to be boring and on message for production use in a business setting. Front page has Docker deployment and continuous integration setup steps etc. (that all exists and works FYI) Everything would be muted colours and mostly cloning the style of https://www.haskell.org/ or https://nodejs.org/en/ or even as spartan as https://www.rust-lang.org/

I love Perl 6 but I utterly reject and hate the Fisher Price look and feel. It makes it impossible to have a serious conversation at work about Perl 6 or get anyone less than light hearted to care about taking a look at the language. There is so much great stuff there, and basically none of it is for children. I'd go as far to say as Perl 6 would be an awful language for very young children. Something like Scratch has put the effort in there. The idea of Camelia being friendly to kids is a great sentiment... but thats as deep as anyone's effort or considerations have gone for children learning to program in the Perl 6 community. IMHO anyone who feels that's a harsh assessment has probably never attempted to teach programming to young children, I have! It's a near impossible task, and the last thing you touch is syntax or documentation websites. I cant help but feel Camelia and her scheming colours are ham stringing adoption by anyone else looking in from their cubicle or startup loft. Maybe I'm very wrong and everyone loves the bug?

I love the bug, but it's because I have a two year old daughter.

I love the bug too really :'( I have a Moomin on my desk, I have the aesthetic sensibility of a two year old. The problem is no one else I work with does. That is a problem, at least for me.

...a few years ago I was in Beijing and was utterly gobsmacked to see, in a ludicrously expensive fashion shop in the heart of the most expensive shopping mall in the city, a shirt with Little My on it.

So apparently we're not the only ones.

Yes, because the website is what's usually hampering adoption of programming languages.

Snark (mostly on point snark, but still) aside, I think you have a point here. It takes one being very shallow to dismiss an entire programming language based on the website being a bit twee.

The only way these kind of knee-jerk reactions get dismantled over time is to ignore the nay-sayers and prove them wrong. And being in a profession where logic is valued, a lot of people here should know better.

Just a idea that drifted into my head:

The background being of a butterfly specimen display, realistic and in faint grey, and one of the butterflies in full colour with the label Perl 6. The other butterflies can even be labelled as other programming languages, like Perl 5 or C or whatever.

I think there's something to this. Whether it's logical or not, a language is partially judged on its web site. The Ruby and Python sites are less whimsical:

https://www.ruby-lang.org

https://www.python.org

I want the language given a chance based on its merits, not dismissed because of a cartoonish site.

This is also interesting that a language would not be only jugged on it's pretty website shell. I mean, if you got a beautiful language, it is logical to create a beautiful packaging for it... But honestly, I am reluctant to these very shinny corporate websites. Languages developed by communities are not companies products, letting it stay out of the corporate philosophy and game with logos, impressive designs and business oriented wills is a good thing: you try the language, read the doc, write some stuff and if you are convinced, you will surely not take care of this kind of logo, it will even become friendly to you.

I think the R homepage is pretty much perfect:

https://www.r-project.org/

Who wouldn't be excited about learning R after visiting the website!

Sarcasm? While it's not a bad website, I wouldn't say it inspires me to get into stats with R. It doesn't have a code example, or much color. I think the python homepage is much better designed

Slightly, but I love R and make a sizeable part of my living using that language. From a design perspective I much prefer websites like R's, rather than disaster zones like Mashable (although haven't been there for a long time, so maybe it has changed too).

I don't think people interested in R are necessarily going to judge it first by its homepage and website.

I obviously can't speak for everyone but there are no changes to the website that would change the attitude about Perl here at work. Twenty years of unmaintainable Perl code has convinced management that it needs to be eradicated.

Note: I'm not bashing Perl here - developers using any language can create unmaintainable code. The move towards producing enterprise-level software has included increasing salaries to the point where professional software engineers can be hired along with adopting architectural principles that are conducive to producing large-scale software.

I don't think it contributes to the conversation to point out that when inexperienced-by-trade people (managers typically don't code) observe inexperienced-by-laziness people (devs who don't learn how to write maintably in any language), they walk away with impressions that have zero correlation to reality.

Especially when they conflate two completely different languages to boot.

There's nothing to take away here other than "some people are beyond being helped".

The parent's question was whether a more enterprise-like web-site would help with Perl6 adoption - I simply said (for our organization) that the answer was no and included a brief description of why that was the case.

In many cases, Java is still considered THE enterprise language. Other languages have invaded that enterprise dominance by running on the JVM. This includes languages like Scala (which was designed for the JVM) and languages like JPython (which was obviously preceded by Python). So here's another question - Would Perl6 adoption in the enterprise be enhanced by compiling it to bytecode and running it on the JVM?

As an aside, my original note admitted that it was at least partially developer practices that led to the excoriation of Perl - that doesn't change the fact that it is no longer acceptable for application development at my workplace.

> Would Perl6 adoption in the enterprise be enhanced by compiling it to bytecode and running it on the JVM?

I doubt the JVM will be officially supported this year but Rakudo's JVM backend has been running Perl 6 code since 2013.

> it is no longer acceptable for application development at my workplace.

Presumably "it" here refers to Perl 5 and not to other languages like Haskell, Scala or Perl 6?

> Java is still considered THE enterprise language. Other languages have invaded that enterprise dominance by running on the JVM. This includes languages like Scala (which was designed for the JVM) and languages like JPython

I'm always interested to know whether Groovy runs in your JVM workplace, and whether just for scripting, or if you build actual applications with it.

>>Twenty years of unmaintainable Perl code has convinced management that it needs to be eradicated.

I wouldn't worry too much about that. I'd rather build awesome things in Perl 6 better, faster and more productively than in any other language.

Those who don't use it have much to lose than those who do.

Actually perl.org website is very well done, and perldoc.perl.org too looks very to-the-point serious site, without the fisher price look.

If the same template is re used for Perl 6, it would work just wonderfully fine.

Larry has already blessed such sites if someone steps up and creates it:

> anyway, that's just the .org site; other sites can have dreary corporate logos if they like :)

http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2011-09-15#i_4432065

I'm pretty sure diakopter owns perl6.com; maybe approach him?

Cool I should give it a go then. perl6.io might be the best plan if we're trying to get HN to take notice and try something out >:3

Larry Wall is speaking at the San Francisco Perl Mongers meeting this evening. Along with most of my team at work, my wife and I are going to attend this event.

The biggest of the three big items remaining in Perl 6 development before GA has been completed, give or take. (The Great List Refactor) I'm not 100% sure of the status of the other two, but I think the Unicode stuff is also well on its way as well.

My prediction is that he will be announcing some kind of Perl 6 1.0 pre-release this evening.

Given that Perl 5 has been helping me pay my bills for the past 22 years, I'm more than a little excited!

Is it usable, performance-wise, in production yet? The company I work for (also a perl 5 shop) gave MoarVM a try about a year ago with a toy application, and it was just unusably slow. The task was just receiving some JSON on a TCP socket, decoding it, and sending a static response, but the round trip time was large enough that the server that made the request marked the transaction as 'timed-out' every time. (This is a task that we can do with perl 5 and still have time left over)

Moar has come light-years over the past 12 months. It very well might be! Give it another try.

I recall a few months ago that a hand full of the benchmarks on JVM were actually running faster than Perl 5.latest, though most were slower.

Perl 6 is far, far more optimizable than Perl 5, and also most similar languages. The long-term focus on correct first is finally paying off.

Thanks for the info, I will give it another try.

Nice to see Perl 6 coming along! Even if it doesn't garner the developer base Perl 5 had back in the 90s, I think Perl 6 is important to push the art of programming along. Kudos to the Perl 6 team.

- Would be nice to make the intro copy more informative. Like: why would I want to use it as a developer? What does it look like compared to my favorite language?

- Really like the examples, especially since I haven't done much with Perl 6. However, like Perl 5, it still looks like parseable line noise to the untrained eye. Would be nice to have some better explanations to go along with the code. Maybe not right on the homepage, but at least linked into it.

- Would like to see the "For Newcomers" links on the "Documentation" page on the homepage.

One of the problems with Perl6 is an excesive proliferation of cute pets and pet names to learn before to start. A second one is that those names are unrelated and random, without a clear relationship between them or with what they can really do.

Fit your tutorial to the desired age of your audience. If something is a virtual machine just start your tutorial calling it 'our virtual machine'. Explain briefly what is a virtual machine, instead to say that is a butterfly with violet wings or something (not everybody knows what to do with this stuff). If is a compiler, call it compiler and go as quick as possible to the next step of the tutorial before to lose the interest of your audience. Is not 'how is named' or 'how cute', is 'what can you do with it' and 'how to use it with the other pieces' what matters.

If you want to use names, at least try to be consistent with the names and designs. If you want to name something 'rakudo' and want to show your sensitive side, great, name the other thing 'sazanka' or so. Something nice, humble, but useful at the same time. Something that can helps you to make a mental image of the whole picture of this 'paradise' landscape in a couple of seconds.

I agree on you.

I read Perl tutorial, its like reading an essay. Not telling you the straight to the point answer. Perl tutorial really bad.

It is optimised for fun.

http://perlgeek.de/blog-en/perl-6/optimized-for-fun.html

The page looks fine. I think the "Fun" and "Whatever" pages could be merged. The front page should probably explain more why someone would want to use the language.

That said though, none of this is going to matter unless there's a good tutorial. Nothing currently available is cutting it as a tutorial.

Compliments to the Perl 6 community. Nice new layout and design.

Thank you!

The parts of this website that everyone is having opinions about (the spokesbug, the "Fisher Price look and feel", etc.) are not particularly new. It seems they date to the first version of the Perl 6 home page from 2009:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090901185334/http://perl6.org/

Obviously targetting the preschool market. Get 'em young!

This reminds me of when jQuery had a cartoon ninja on their homepage. Am I seriously looking at a page targeted at grown adults with a talking butterfly on it?

Also, 'spunky little sister' doesn't mean the same thing in the UK as the US...

Yeah that did occur to me too, but either way "spunky" is never a word I want to see when I'm reading about a programming language.

Similar feelings towards splunk.com (crash reporting etc for mobile apps etc)

Well it can by context, but yeah sniggering does abound. At least she doesn't also have a "fanny pack" in the logo too.

Did they really go through the exercise of trade marking the butterfly logo? They must be serious about this style of branding this version of Perl.

Probably not, you can legally stick a TM symbol on just about anything without submitting any paperwork. There's a joke that TM stands for Totally Meaningless because it offers zero protection.

Yeah, if memory serves you have to have a registered trademark (the kind that gives you the circled "R") to have any real protection.

I think the plain TM might help you if it is published on paper (like in some well-known dated publication) and you are later fighting someone else for the registered trademark, but it might be only slightly better than no help whatsoever.

And yet, everybody loves Go.

In my experience the Gopher logo is the second most criticized feature of the Go language, right after the lack of generics.

1. Go-hate isn't hard to find, especially on HN.

2. Liking Go != liking the mascot

3. I think most would agree this is ridiculous: https://www.googlemerchandisestore.com/Google+Redesign/Brand...

This is also cute.

The plush toy is cute, but it's the fact that Google monetizes an open source programming language by selling plushies that I find ridiculous

Well, since the gopher images are Creative Commons Attributions 3.0 licensed[1], you could make your own and sell them or give them away if you wanted. I think the point is to promote the language, not to monetize it, and making it available through the Google merchandise store was probably easiest for those involved.

1: https://blog.golang.org/gopher

I believe many others feel differently, but personally, I find the Go mascot a bit scary. Dunno the reason, but it's something that I can't easily get used when reading the articles on Go.

FWIW, Russ Cox's GitHub icon[1] is similarly scary to me.

[1] https://github.com/rsc

I've never been a fan of "creepy pervert gerbil" either. I wasn't familiar with Russ's even creepier rabbit-thing, but now the gerbil makes more sense.

On of the examples in the main page is how to create a custom postfix operator using a weird unicode symbol. It doesn't get more perlish than that!

The examples on the homepage kind of underscore how little like Perl Perl 6 actually is.

Really? I don't see it that way at all.

I mean, it's not that much different than all the new changes to C++ in the last 10 years (compared to the C++ from 10 years ago).

Yeah, there are a bunch of new things, but it still looks Perlish to me.

This looks so awful. How can you take the language seriously with a homepage lke that?

You don't. You take it in a fun way, the way it's meant to be :) And if you have any specifics on what looks "so awful", feel free to file an Issue on github: https://github.com/perl6/perl6.org/issues

Not sure who thought that colour scheme was going to win people over. Wouldn't it make more sense to have something of a cooler temperature that's more likely to be easy on the eyes?

No, because the monotone, cool, corporate colour scheme is not reflective of the fun and hugtastic Perl 6 community.

love the logo, hate the mustard yellow on gray.

Then you're probably not going to like the 'Getting Started' page: http://perl6.org/getting-started/

(I've opened an issue.)

Update: Fixed now.

"Because an unreadable language deserves an unreadable website"

(sorry, cheap shot. I like Perl really)

Thanks, yes. That one is awful.

Holy Shit! Childish design of Perl 6 site. I think the Perl 6 dev core is not serious. Perl 6 is an ugly language!

Funny thing about Perl 6 syntax and feature are reinvented the wheel all over again like Perl 6 'gather' and 'take' syntax, Only Perl 6 have that syntax. A lot of Reinventing the wheel in syntax and feature make Perl 6 a very bad language.

Poor Grim_Reaper. Nothing to do all day but post complaints in a Perl 6 thread. I hope you can find some sort of purpose in life, friend.

So is it just a custom coloured version of Twitter Bootstrap?

Yes it is: http://i.imgur.com/sJjJwSa.png

This ship sailed 10 years ago. It's too little too late.

The real question is whether python3 can avoid the same fate...

Python 3 is not even in the same boat. Please stop trolling.

I would say that they are different issues.

Python 3 really is almost 7 years old and it is moving forward. The Wall of Shame has become the Wall of Super Powers. The scope for Python 3 was different than Perl 6.

Perl 6 was to be ageless and for all time. Python 3 was a fix to a broken issues in Python 2 having redundant ways to do things.

> Python 3.0 was developed with the same philosophy as in prior versions. However, as Python had accumulated new and redundant ways to program the same task, Python 3.0 had an emphasis on removing duplicative constructs and modules, in keeping with "There should be one— and preferably only one —obvious way to do it". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python

I don't mind there being more than one way to do things.

A completely different issue. Python3 is an upgrade to Python2. Perl 6 became a new language, while Perl 5 still chugging along at full speed (latest stable release was just 4 months ago).

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