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Comment by colinramsay | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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