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A new Curl logo

daniel.haxx.se

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I just realized after all these years, I think I've been saying the name wrong.

In my head, I say "curl" as in curly hair. It's really "see-url"!? I think it's too late for my brain to correct that.

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48735/how-do-you-...

That was too traumatic to contemplate, so I referred to the FAQ and found relief in section 1.1:

"We pronounce curl and cURL with an initial k sound: [kurl]."

They do, however, note that the "fact it can also be pronounced 'see URL' also helped" [to choose the name].

I did also pronounced [kurl]. Didn't notice see-URL, because of a different pronunciation on "c". :)

You think that's traumatic?

See you are ell.

Wait, is that wrong? I've only ever met a single person that pronounced URL like "Earl". Everyone else says the letters, and thus, you get "see you are ell". I tend to go back and forth with cURL, sometimes calling it "kurl".

Same problem with SQL. Is it "ess que ell" or "sequel"?

The nice thing about SQL and URL is that they're so widely used in our profession that regardless of how you say them you will be understood easily. Some people say "ess que ell" and others say "sequel" and that's fine; everyone understands everyone.

It's unconventional pronunciations of less common initialisms that cause problems.

May I lament at this point that we non native speakers often miss out on the pun entirely and read brand-/projectnames as abstract fantasy words.

SQL -> "sequel", how could we know?

"Sequel", or "skewl" when I'm in a hurry. Who has time to say "ess que ell"?

A friend of mine, who is not a fan of database work, pronounces it "squeal".

That's why I say "postgres", not "postgre sql".

What about Postgres Cue Ell?

On one occasion I overheard SQL pronounced as squeal.

Stunned into silence.

Many people use 'seaqual' if that is what you mean.. I don't think it is rare.

"Squeal", like a pig. Not "Sequel" like 'Babe: pig in the city'.

squirrel :)

Haha that's just too much... sorry.

That reminds me that I had been using sudo for close to 15 years before I realized that it was a combination of 'su' and 'do.' I'm still not sure if it's properly pronounced 'pseudo' or 'sue-doo', but it really blew my mind once I figured out the name.

Edit: Changed 'sue-do' to 'sue-doo' to make it less ambiguous.

I always though it was abbreviated of super-do - much like the other unixisms (ls, cd etc.)

> I'm still not sure if it's properly pronounced 'pseudo' or 'sue-do

Those are both pronounced the same way.

The first one is sue-doe, the second is sue-do

> Those are both pronounced the same way.

The prior is pronounced /ˈso͞odō/

The latter is pronounced /so͞odu/

in the days of yore when I learned to program in basic before learning English I pronounced goto with the second o rhyming with the first one, it embarassignly also took some time after learning English to figure out that goto was "go to" as my brain had made the programming association and wasn't treating it as a language construct at all...

Speaking about sudo, learned that before living in an English speaking country, so everybody pronounced rhyming with su-go (say) not su-do and I still pronounce it that way (which I guess it's wrong!)

ah, the joys of learning English as a written language first, even now after living in North America for nearly 20 years occasionally I find words I completely mispronounce due to having learned them from books

I was a bit disappointed when I discovered that "su" doesn't stand for superuser but for the rather bland "set uid".

why not "switch user", hah

This is a useful discovery though, as it points you towards the fact that as well as running as super user (the default) sudo can run a command as any target user (e.g. `sudo -u zofrex dosomethingevil`).

I know it's not actually true, but I choose to believe that "su" stands for superuser and "sudo" is a witty pun which means both "superuser do" and "pseudo" because you're pretending to be a superuser.

Ha me too, you are not alone. Then again I used the word exotic for esoteric for many years, I wondered why people would always deny the solution was exotic in a giggly way as i loud ranted everything was too damn exotic. etiquette was another source of laughter, at 33 i finally figured out how to say it correctly. shit happens!

I've made this mistake with LaTeX. I was so embarrassed when someone told me "Its pronounced lah-tekh".

Another one is Tuple (like in a data base)

Too pool -or- Tup ulll -or- Tup lee

So many choice from just five letters....

I'd always heard "Two Pull"s as the one true way, not to be confused with "Triple"s.

"Tup Lee" just seems silly.

Not to pick on the place that invented "Sweet Tea" and BBQ, but in the south, ya'll just need to drag out those vowels....

Tuple is a mathematical term predating computers, and the "-tuple" suffix is older again, so pronunciation shouldn't be as ambiguous as the other, newly invented terms.

(It's historically rhymed with couple)

On the other hand, a lot of Latin-originating words have had their pronunciations changed in US English, the canonical example being data (from UK English "da-ta" to US English "day-ta", which has now begun to become standard everywhere due to the tech industry) so I guess other words could go the same way.

> (It's historically rhymed with couple)

So it's true! It is pronounced with a short initial syllable. I've always pronounced it along the lines of toople.

Surely day-ta and da-ta are the wrong way round there?

Unless I've worded it confusingly, I don't think so...

Or my favorite, combining your first two choices: too-pull.

You shouldn't feel embarrassed about how you pronounce LaTeX. In the words of its creator Leslie Lamport:

> One of the hardest things about LaTeX is deciding how to pronounce it.This is also one of the few things I'm not going to tell you about LaTeX, since pronunciation is best determined by usage, not fiat. TeX is usually pronounced teck, making lah-teck, and lay-teck the logical choices; but language is not always logical, so lay-tecks is also possible.

The Knuth quotation from your link:

> Insiders pronounce the χ of TeX as a Greek chi, not as an ‘x’, so that TeX rhymes with the word blecchhh. It’s the ‘ch’ sound in Scottish words like loch or German words like ach; it’s a Spanish ‘j’ and a Russian ‘kh’. When you say it correctly to your computer, the terminal may become slightly moist.

Surely, we should be insiders.

There are two kinds of people ...

Really? I thought it was "lay-tack".

Speaking of potentially ambiguous pronunciations, I recently learned that Dr. Richard Hipp, the creator of SQLite, pronounce it Es Que Ell-ite or Sequel-ite, the -ite postfix being inspired by minerals/rocks (like stalagmite).

Source: https://changelog.com/201/

I say 'es queue lite' and like it that way.

This is the way I've said it too, but "sequelite" is too good to give up on.

or, seek-light

It's like people who think after many years of programming that "char" is actually pronounced "care". Nope. In real life people just read things. "char" the stick in the fire all day long.

I still say 'car' in my head. Hardest one for me was 'it-erator' instead of 'eye-terator'. I still lapse and use the latter on accident out of habit!

I'm not sure how you got eye-terator, but I can sort of see where 'car' came from. I guess I'm lucky here, because I learned to always say:

'char' : as in charcoal

'car' : pronounced like a car, used as (car (cons 'a 'b))

'cdr' : supposed to be 'could-er', but I flip between cee-derr and could-er

'cadaddr' : prounounced 'why'

I kid a little, but it's funny to hear these things, especially when it's from somebody from a foreign country. It wasn't until grad school that I realized there's so many different ways to pronounce keywords.

I still say 'car' out loud and in my head because the "char" type is short for "character", and the first syllable of the full word is pronounced 'car', not 'char'.

Isn't it care-actor? I can't say car-actor without hearing a fake British accent.

It's more like cah-actor, I'd say.

... I pronounce it like "care". :(

But I also pronounce "enum" like "ee num", not "ee noom", so there is apparently no overarching theme.

The new logo is nice, certainly cleaner and more better-looking than the old one.

However, the association for me is very much to PCB design since the lines with hollow circles look like tracks with vias or just pads for through-hole components. See, for instance, the background on KiCad's (an actual PCB design program) site: http://kicad-pcb.org/.

This "inspiration" was visible in the first suggestion too, the one with the c-as-symbol also makes the c look like circuit board tracks. Strange.

In the next revision, some years later, my guess is they'll keep the :// (which as I've typed it looks like a frown with a double chin) and de-emphasize the PCB aspects through graphic simplification.

Yeah, I'm not sure what that's about either. It seems far too thorough to be accidental, but the association is a strange one for a command line utility. I suppose it might make sense if the logo is designed for consumption by people who don't know much about computers, but that's really not something which can accurately be said of the thing the logo is for, so...

For something that claims to "grok" URLs, using "://" as part of the logo seems to be misunderstanding how URLs (are supposed to) work.

According to RFC3986, URIs (the proper name; URLs are a kind of URI) are correctly of the form:

    <scheme>:<scheme-specific-part>

For some schemes, the <scheme-specific-part> may contain a <hierarchical-part>, the format for which is:

    //<authority>[/<path>] | <path>

So it's only hierarchical URIs with a defined authority that have the (admittedly iconic) "://" in them.

I know most people identity URIs as having that sequence in them, but these are all valid URIs:

    mailto:bob@example.com
    sip:bob@example.com
    tel:+18005550123
    file:/path/to/file

I'm not saying I expect everyone to understand these subtleties, but people who claim to grok URLs ought to.

It's a logo dude...

But I liked his comment, and explanation! I also learned some. What are we supposed to say, "nice!"? :-)

Does cURL support mailto/sip/tel?

No, it supports mainly schemes with a hierarchical-part - even though it works with 'file:'

For a logo there's absolutely no problem in using an element that's common and pretty identifiable

This might shed some light - Curl Developer on URLs

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hGPFWP...

While on the subject, what is the difference between file:/path/to/file and file:///path/to/file ? Usually I only see the latter being used.

In file:///, the file:// part signifies the protocol (think http://) and the / in /path/to/file signifies the root directory (think / in /home/user/)

I have never seen file:/ used before, so I can't really comment, but it seems invalid to me (and browsers auto-redirect it to ///).

Almost.

The file: signifies the protocol. The /// is actually //<machinename>/ with an empty machinename as a shorthand for 'localhost'.

Interesting.

Why is this interpreted as a relative path?

     cd /etc
     curl file://resolv.conf

Well, it's ill-formed, so what the UA does with it isn't really specified; cURL presumably treats it as a path relative to . because that's what the developer(s) decided that cURL should do. (For comparison, Firefox transforms it into file:///resolv.conf, then tries to find /resolv.conf on localhost and fails.)

In the article:

"I also suggested we’d try to work with :// (colon slash slash) somehow as a symbol, since after all the :// letter sequence is commonly used in all the URL formats that curl supports. And it is sort of a global symbol for URLs when you start to think about it. Made sense to me."

They seem to grok it perfectly well, but recognize the modern association people have with :// and urls.

Every time I see the word grok I grok in my mouth a little.

Why? What's wrong with it? It's a real word (i.e. it's in Merriam-Webster).

Not to mention that Tim Berners-Lee himself says that the // was superfluous in retrospect. Regardless, I don't think that paying homage to a widely-known idiosyncrasy of our technological evolution is the worst way to go for a project like curl (a historic project in its own right).

Cached version of link: http://archive.is/TRDMX

Thanks. Darn, I like the second version much more than the third. Oh well.

Agreed, this one kind of looks like a disapproving emoji.

I didn't know it even had a logo. I only ever see it as a command in a terminal.

And the new logo is right there in every url that you curl. :)

Yeah I don't see why it would need a logo. Just write "curl" with some fancy font.

Great! NetBSD fixed this "logo" http://www.netbsd.org/images/NetBSD-old.jpg Now all we need is for R to get rid of this monstrosity http://www.jeveuxetredatascientist.fr/wp-content/uploads/201... and we'll be on a roll.

I know that mentioning PHP on here is grounds for crucifixion, but the fact that Composer (https://getcomposer.org/) has a conductor as its identity has always bothered me.

They even serve different images with different colours on each refresh!

Originally proposed logo looks so much better than the accepted one. Perfect example of client interfering with suggestions that result in something safe but boring.

I have yet to see a logo redesign which some designer didn't criticise.

I agree with his objection to the first. It's easy to see the logo with the logotext and read it as "URL" instead of "curl."

The logo for the accepted version is the best of the 3, in my opinion. However, when looking at it combined with the logotext it looks kind of odd in that the slashes are leaning away from the word curl so prominently. (#2 doesn't have this problem). No matter, though, it is a big improvement.

Do you mean the one with the :// which precedes the "curl"? If so, I agree. The first version was too complex and inconsistent, but the third version played it too safe. I also agree with another poster who said that the accepted logo has more in common with PCBs than URLs.

I agree this one is far more elegant and IMO also more meaningful - the dots in it could be nodes in a network.

http://archive.li/TRDMX/c9b30e15b66869f9d7c9f825e9771b3b9828...

the important part of the name is URL after all. Logos are always tricky though; everyone wants to have input, which means you often end up with things like the last logo with lots of ideas mushed together.

For some reason the slightly different colour of the final slash bugs me.

I can't help but see the 'l' floating up higher than the rest of the letters (it isn't). Even so, it's a lot better than the original.

nah, you're going mad: http://i.imgur.com/1TPBQVU.png

He does have a point though.

In type design, curves and points will usually extend out further then straight square edges to stop them looking like they have stopped just short.

If you blow up some text large and draw a line on the baseline between an 'x' and rounded character like an 'o', the o will go slightly beyond the line. If it didn't, it would look too small to the eye. This is what you would call 'optically correct'. (Its the same for typefaces with pointy 'w's and stuff)

The stem of the bottom of the 'r' in the logo is rounded, so that could make the straight edge of the 'l' look out of place to the human eye, even though that when you draw a line, they line up.

I have always been a fan of wget, but upon searching around for some of the differences I came across this:

https://daniel.haxx.se/docs/curl-vs-wget.html

Which is a pretty good summary of the similarities and differences, and it makes me want to try curl a bit more than I have in the past, especially the support for scp and cifs.

I switched due to the SOCKS support in curl. For either one, if you use Firefox the cliget addon is quite handy :).

https://github.com/zaidka/cliget

Website is quite slow, here's a cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

Thanks, wont even load for me.

Reminds me of the Steam logo at first glance. Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but there's definitely a strong connection in my mind between that logo and Steam now.

I didn't even know it had an old logo! Looks good.

Congrats to Soft Dreams, that's the best way to become recognized.

I am registering the site as down, and isitdown also can't resolve[0] host. Anyone else having trouble reaching the site?

[0]http://imgur.com/CpJVWrR

Does cURL really need a logo?

Is it hurting anybody having one? It had one before, so at some point the answer was yes, and I guess it remains yes.

Is the font courier ?

Why not just a magnet for the C?

I don't like the new or old logo.

looks great!

it reminds me of /.

I presume the downvoting is for the word shit, have to fucking love hipster news.

Please don't post comments like this. The HN guidelines ask you not to go on about getting downvoted; unfair downvotes are usually corrected by the community; and it's in bad taste to diss a community that you're as much a part of as anyone.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11785541 and marked it off-topic.

link is down, but I am wondering how can this story become a #1 top story on this site?

Urr because everyone on this site uses curl every day at every available opportunity?

I think curl is one of those little things that don't get much attention, but are invaluable for much of our serious work. And just announcing a logo for it makes some of us recognize it and remember to appreciate the efforts of the project.

+1 for the logo. Now please update the project web site with matching colors :P

I was surprised that there are no curls on the curl logo.

Well, there's one "curl".

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