A Mascot

Ruby
81

What you find silly might now be silly to another, else there wouldn’t
have been such a long discussion about a topic which was run through
before.

Most posts are not in favor of a mascot from what I have read of this
thread. This is probably why there isn’t one to begin with - and I
hope it stays that way.

A logo and a mascot are a few of the essential items to forming a
community,

Funny, that an essential item has been missing all these years yet
there are and have been many Ruby communities in existence at this
very moment.

it helps to rally the members better.

???

Last time I checked, Ruby was a programming language, and the members
of its community were bound by their use of the language, not by
whether or not a cartoon mascot existed.

I can think of no programmer worth his salt who would need a cartoon
mascot to “rally” with others in a “better” fashion.

This is about the code.

82

Hi –

On Sun, 24 Aug 2008, David M. wrote:

But if you’d rather talk about inclusiveness… Is Ruby particularly
under-represented, among programming languages? We’re talking about a very
small niche of an already male-dominated field.

It’s not that Ruby is particularly male-dominated; it’s that it isn’t
more equitable and integrated, as to sex, than other technical
communities. It seemed to me, and others I think, at one point that
the possibility existed of Ruby distinguishing itself through its
inclusiveness. The hope was that Ruby could break the cycle. We have
some extremely accomplished women in our midst, but I think they’d
agree that, so far at least, we haven’t broken the mold of the more or
less typical technical community.

My attitude toward Ruby has always been that our community has the
power to do things right – not to look to precedents, and not to use
less-than-exemplary exemplars as a justification for what we do, but
to do things right. In some respects I think we’ve done it. In the
matter of breaking out of the boys’-club paradigm to any really
impressive degree, we haven’t.

David

83

On 8/24/08, Mayuresh K. [email protected] wrote:

On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 12:30 PM, MRH [email protected] wrote:
Going by your logic, even the logo is irrelevant, but it was an effort
supported by Matz himself.

The logo is irrelevant. I can’t recall ever having seen it on
anything, other than the ruby-lang.org website. It has also been
widely criticized in this community for not scaling well and not
looking good in greyscale.

Logos, unlike mascots, at least help anchor a webpage design.

84

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 11:21:10PM +0900, Karl von Laudermann wrote:

Actually, didn’t _why create this duck to be a ruby mascot?
http://redhanded.hobix.com/images/redhanded-duck.gif

http://whytheluckystiff.net/clog/ruby/theOnlyCopyrightlessDuckInRecentHistory.html

It is only a duck used to evade copyright infringement. A personal
mascot, spawned by a thread long ago called “duck images” here on
ruby-talk. There used to have a drb server that would cough up ASCII
duck animations.

I know matz was originally amenable to the ruby-crowned kinglet.
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/1469

_why

85

Going by your logic, even the logo is irrelevant, but it was an effort
supported by Matz himself.

Nice try on your part, yet laughable. You stated “essential”, and I
countered by implying that it was not essential, and now you twist
that around to “irrelevant” (a cheap strawman wearing a sign that says
“your logic”), and throw in Matz’s name.

Then why does every “major” programming effort have a mascot/logo?
FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, Darwin, Minix3, Python, Apache, …

Each community wanted one, obviously.

Its good to be a programmer, but its important to be a programmer having
taste.

Anyone worthy of being referred to as a programmer knows that taste is
subjective, this is only obvious . . . yet the concept is obviously
alien to you.

How old are you again?

86

On Aug 24, 2008, at 18:38, _why wrote:

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 11:21:10PM +0900, Karl von Laudermann wrote:

Actually, didn’t _why create this duck to be a ruby mascot?
http://redhanded.hobix.com/images/redhanded-duck.gif

http://whytheluckystiff.net/clog/ruby/theOnlyCopyrightlessDuckInRecentHistory.html

I now propose that every item here now achieve official Mascot status:
http://www.thispeanutlookslikeaduck.com/

87

Hey _why,

You rock man.

MRH

88

Here’s a bird that writes (anything) with the tip of its beak.

http://flea.sourceforge.net/penBird.gif

But y’all can’t have it :slight_smile:

89

On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 8:10 AM, MRH [email protected] wrote:

Going by your logic, even the logo is irrelevant, but it was an effort
supported by Matz himself.

Nice try on your part, yet laughable. You stated “essential”, and I
countered by implying that it was not essential, and now you twist
that around to “irrelevant” (a cheap strawman wearing a sign that says
“your logic”), and throw in Matz’s name.

Your analytical system is seriously flawed and so is your logic.

Then why does every “major” programming effort have a mascot/logo?
FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, Darwin, Minix3, Python, Apache, …

Each community wanted one, obviously.

So what is stopping the Ruby community from wanting one?
That’s a question which has been asked before, “why” doesn’t the Ruby
community want a mascot?

Its good to be a programmer, but its important to be a programmer having
taste.

Anyone worthy of being referred to as a programmer knows that taste is
subjective, this is only obvious . . . yet the concept is obviously
alien to you.

There you go off at a tangent again.
Taste can sometimes also be absolute.
All Apple products are tastefully done, that’s an accepted fact.

But then again, taste is a concept obviously alien to you.

How old are you again?

~Mayuresh

90

Your analytical system is seriously flawed and so is your logic.

Interesting, coming from you. See below.

So what is stopping the Ruby community from wanting one?

The question makes no sense. Nothing is “stopping the Ruby community
from wanting” a mascot. People simply do not want one. The reasons are
in all likelihood multiple, and do not need to be justified.

That’s a question which has been asked before, “why” doesn’t the Ruby
community want a mascot?

Once again, if the community wanted one, one would already exist.
That’s more than obvious. See above.

There you go off at a tangent again.

I do not think tangent means what you think it means.

Taste can sometimes also be absolute.

False. Ludicrous.

All Apple products are tastefully done, that’s an accepted fact.

A fact? That’s ridiculous, stating that something as subjective as
finding Apple products to feature tasteful design is “an accepted
fact.” Laughable, that is.

But then again, taste is a concept obviously alien to you.

Even if that were so (and you have no way of knowing this) I can at
least differentiate between objective and subjective.

I am shocked, I figured you were a teenager.

MRH

91

From: “David M.” [email protected]

On Monday 25 August 2008 01:44:15 Mayuresh K. wrote:

All Apple products are tastefully done, that’s an accepted fact.

It’s too late, and I’m too tired to give this the hearty laugh it deserves…

Bemused chuckle accompanied by a slightly incredulous and rueful
head shake here.

In fact, the first iMacs were widely regarded tasteless, at least among people
I know. Were they wrong? If so, why?

Indeed. Anyone remember when Apple’s QuickTime Player was
inducted into the Interface Hall of Shame?

http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/qtime.htm

Seems like only yesterday. (A quick spot check on the
current Windows version of the player reveals the persistence
of some of these misfeatures after nearly a decade…!
After opening the QuickTime Player application, one
still can’t drag movies from the desktop onto the weird
QuickTime “home page” window that presents itself by
default. I just launched a movie player application, and
can’t drop movies onto it? … And the volume slider is
not visually disabled, but becomes immobile whenever the
volume has been muted…with no visual cue whatsoever.
I just spent a good 10-15 mouse clicks puzzling over
why the volume slider wouldn’t move. Maybe because the
movie was paused? No… Hmm… Maybe this movie doesn’t
have an audio track? No? … etc.)

It’s clear Apple was attempting to be stylish with
their interface.

But in order for the result to be considered tasteful it
should probably meet some basic criteria like not sucking.

(Ugh… anyway… apologies for the off-topic post.)

Regards,

Bill

92

Bill K. wrote:

Bemused chuckle accompanied by a slightly incredulous and rueful
head shake here.

I was pairing with a mac user recently. The text carat was here:

ab|c

To delete c, they typed Right, then Delete.

It was really sad to watch…

93

On Monday 25 August 2008 01:44:15 Mayuresh K. wrote:

All Apple products are tastefully done, that’s an accepted fact.

It’s too late, and I’m too tired to give this the hearty laugh it
deserves…

A fact would be that many Apple products have received good reviews
for
design – and even then, “many” is a subjective quantity. (How many?
What
percentage? is “many”?)

Closer would be a fact stating that a certain percentage of consumers
you
asked approve of Apple’s design, in general – or maybe they approve of
the
iPhone, in particular.

Whether they actually are tasteful is opinion, not fact.

In fact, the first iMacs were widely regarded tasteless, at least among
people
I know. Were they wrong? If so, why?

94

This thing is going to go on for ever, it’s pointless discussing
issues of community building and taste with someone like you.

If it is pointless it is only because you have clearly demonstrated
that you haven’t the slightest clue. This community is driven by an
exceptional programming language the design of which has more taste
than you can fathom. If you could, you would not have kicked off this
thread. I found your focus on a cartoon mascot to be offensive in that
it implicitly belittles the virtues and merits of the Ruby programming
language. The language does not need a cartoon mascot, it stands tall
on its own merit.

And this thread has gone on way too long, I will no more post on this thread.

You referred to the amount of discussion as something positive in an
earlier post. What happened pray tell?

This community is really great, don’t want to pollute it with a
discussion that is going no where.

You already have I am afraid. I must hand it to you, you managed to
irk me (and several other members as far as I can see) and this tends
to be a comparatively cool and laid back crowd.

MRH

95

On 8/25/08, MRH [email protected] wrote:

That’s a question which has been asked before, “why” doesn’t the Ruby

Even if that were so (and you have no way of knowing this) I can at
least differentiate between objective and subjective.

I am shocked, I figured you were a teenager.

This thing is going to go on for ever, it’s pointless discussing
issues of community building and taste with someone like you.

And this thread has gone on way too long, I will no more post on this
thread.

This community is really great, don’t want to pollute it with a
discussion that is going no where.

Best,

~Mayuresh

96

how about everyone just waits for Matz to say something, everyone is
just
saying, “Matz this, matz that, matz said blah blah”, let’s just wait for
him
to say something or maybe some one ask him. It is true that most large
scale
OS’s or Programming languages have some symbol.
For the peopel that say that it is not necessary, the mascot is
not
for anyone on this mailing list, because, obvsiouly, we are on this
mailing
list because we are passionent about Ruby. The logo and masoct should be
used so people new to programming or Ruby have a association in there
head
with Ruby plus something interesting or cool. The human mind remembers
images much better than it remembers words, or facts. So, instead of
someone
saying, “What is that great dynamic languages with every feature I want”
and
not remembering the name, they think to the logo and the logo connotates
the
name. This is how many poeple who can remember a lot of things remember
them, with images that connotate the word to be remembered.

Reuben

97

Wow, I haven’t been in this thread for a while. Getting a little hot in
here.

I won’t post about a mascot anymore, I can tell this is apparently a
pretty controversial idea. My closing thoughts: If a mascot is made and
the community rallies behind it, it will happen virally. Someone will
make a mascot on their own (or commission one on their own) anyway, and
if enough people like it, so be it.

Come to think of it, our local meetup might have fun with a locally
themed mascot.

  • Clinton
98

Gah, I said I wouldn’t post anymore.

We already have a symbol. A ruby. It works really well as a symbol, for
the reasons you state.

We’re discussing the possibility of a mascot. I think the logo works
fine for the language, and I think the idea of a mascot was more of a
community thing. Maybe I’m mistaken. In any case, the mailing list has
at least said, by large, that they don’t want a mascot.

I’m just going to use _why’s foxes if I ever need to. :slight_smile:

99

MRH wrote:

This thing is going to go on for ever, it’s pointless discussing
issues of community building and taste with someone like you.
If it is pointless it is only because you have clearly demonstrated
that you haven’t the slightest clue. This community is driven by an
exceptional programming language the design of which has more taste
than you can fathom.

This community is also driven by the principle “Matz is nice so we are
nice.”

jwm

100

On Monday 25 August 2008 06:30:45 Phlip wrote:

To delete c, they typed Right, then Delete.

To be fair, it’s now possible to get a reasonably full-sized keyboard
from
Apple. It’s one of the best keyboards I’ve ever used, as far as simply
typing – and it does include a “delete ->” button, for what “del” does
on
other keyboards (and in exactly the same place).

There are, however, MANY other things to hate about that keyboard.
Simple
example: It doesn’t have an insert key; it has “fn” there instead, which
is
interpreted inside the keyboard (it never hits the OS). Thus, the only
way to
remap it might be to change the firmware inside the thing.