Jetbrains Kindly Asks You to Stop Using the Kotlin Mascot in Its Current Form | Hacker News Reader

Jetbrains Kindly Asks You to Stop Using the Kotlin Mascot in Its Current Form

blog.jetbrains.com

18 pointsAaaaustin22 comments

Hopefully they try out any names in Google Translate before choosing them. Kot can mean shit (German), meat (Swedish) and cat (Lots of languages, which is really good since the mascot looks a bit like a cat). Diacritics change the meaning quite a lot.

Little known infosec trivia: the BorderWare firewall was originally known as Janus, after the Roman god of gates, transitions, etc. But they changed the name to BorderWare (the company at the time was Border Network Technologies) when they discovered it was pretty much universally pronounced like Anus just about everywhere outside of North America.

As far as I gather from that post the mascot has no name yet. Also as someone who natively speaks German, I don't see any problem with the name "Kotlin" and I never associated it with "Kot".

Suggesting that they use Google Translate to realize the additional meaning seems especially smug given the fact that they have a German translation of that post available.

I am referring to the mascot names people are suggesting, not Kotlin itself. Hence the future tense, and speaking of the mascot directly. No smugness - some of the suggestions translate to completely different things in other languages, and that is what I am pointing out.

I see why my recounting of BorderWare's product made you think that. It's related, but not the same story.

Oh, you are referring to the name suggestions in the comments below the blog post? Yeah. Something where "Kot" is a standalone word would definitely be an unfortunate name choice.

I read your post that way that you argued that "Kotlin" is a bad naming choice. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

I had to think for a good ten seconds before realizing that you meant kött in Swedish.

On the other hand, Uniqlo means 'mixed-gender toilet' in German, but the clothing chain by that name seems to be doing fine there.

Can you reference that? As a german I can see how "Uniklo" can mean that, but never heard that and I would rather assume it's a university toilet if someone would use it. From searching I can't find anything related to the term, i.e. duden.de doesn't know it.

It's a joke I heard many years ago. Apologies if it's inaccurate.

There is always Assmann. I know them mostly due to their high quality industrial connectors. Siemens is also a dodgy sounding name in English.

The name comes from Kotlin Island, near St. Petersburg. Andrey Breslav mentioned that the team decided to name it after an island, just like Java was named after the Indonesian island of Java.

Any word is potentially offensive in another language. Western European languages are just a few out of thousands.

I was referring only to coming up with a name for the mascot. Not the name Kotlin itself. Besides, Kotlin actually sounds like a computer language name.

> Hopefully they try out any names in Google Translate before choosing them

Or maybe a more reliable approach, e.g kot does not translate to meat in Swedish :)

It could mean bone without considering the diacritic comment. But I digress. IKEA has a Pruta line that I first misread as Prutta, so my Swedish is pretty unreliable already.

> Kotlin has been around for ten years, but there was always one big thing that we felt was missing – a mascot.

Why?

https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2021/07/adding-volume-to-t...

Some people get paid to do, pardon my language, nothing personal meant to the individuals who got hired to do it, but, the stupidest shit. Who needs "mascots" and 3d logos? Marketing executives' résumés. Nobody else needs this. This crap is an indicator of cancerous growth within an organization.

Wow, when they said adding volume, they literally meant extrude.

I still can't believe they decided that the new logo (right) was better. A purple silhouette of a K is just drab.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screen...

But but but but google replaced all the nice, easy to read and disambiguate icons for their services on android with shitty, samey, flat, way too similar icons and they make a gazillion dollars so they must know what they're doing!!!

It would be nice if UX design could go back to being research based, and no I don't mean A/B testing. A/B testing isn't research and all those metrics you collect are not data just because there are a lot of them. If you want useful data, you have to do a shitload of extra work around making sure you are getting good samples, making sure you can try and account for biases and confounding variables etc.

Yes, the flat icons for Google products are indistinguishable from each other now.

The other fad is tonnes of whitespace in UIs and no edges so you're just staring at a white light all day. This is widespread on Windows 10 + 11 (see the Settings app) and on recent macos.

Nobody was using it anyway including Jetbrains themselves. It looks ugly and weird, not at all cute.

did it get Canceled?

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