The Pythonistas are Wrong

There’s something that’s been bugging me for a long time that I need to get off my chest. Some of you may hate me for it, but perhaps there are others out there with the same complaint, silently in agony, wishing for death to take the pain away. It’s time to set the record straight, and prove once and for all that the Pythonistas are wrong.

Pythons almost NEVER look like this:
python logo

The frog shown here is what the Python Foundation refers to as a “snake” (though it looks more like a frog), more specifically a blue/yellow one. The name “Python” however refers to a group of six British Gentleman* and something like 86.43% people know that. The name was chosen because snakes just suck. Get it? It’s not a snake, they are British.

Pythons however are better represented by a 16-ton weight or a dead parrot. But they are NOT represented by snakes.

scipy logo
See that one in the scipy logo? That’s a public domain circle someone added a white snake to. A SNAKE. Look at the wikipedia article and search for “snake”. Yeah, no match.

pycon08 logo
Even the Pycon (where Guido van Rossum himself spoke) has made the mistake of choosing this stupid snake.

xml tag python
lxml is doing it wrong too.

And probably your favourite Python module too. So keep in mind: Pythons are not Snakes!. And I think that proves once and for all that there are tons of projects with the wrong logo out there.

Sorry headius for taking advantage of your blog post but I wanted to blog about that for quite some time anyways ;-)

Update: fixed my mistake about all Pythons being British. Thanks Joe Pantuso.
Update 2: apparently they are all British now. *Terry Gilliam renounced his American citizenship. Thanks meow

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 9:33 pm and tagged as thoughts, python. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

21 Responses to “The Pythonistas are Wrong”

  1. You have forgotten to mention some others examples like the German python community (Forum and Wiki) and, more important, Inyoka, the new ubuntuusers software *fg*. And, the python site itself describes your frog logo with “intertwined snake graphic”. So don’t disturb things, I like those snakes ;)

    Comment by Christoph Hack — Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 @ 9:52 pm

  2. And then there’s these jerks, who stole our true logo: http://www.parrotcode.org/

    At least they let us name the Python frontend Pirate, which is cool.

    Comment by Cory — Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 @ 10:58 pm

  3. hehe, cool :)

    What about the pygame logo?

    http://pygame.org/news.html

    I think it’s a fairly correct interpretation at the moment… but the logo does seem to change a bit.

    Maybe the monty part should be in pythonistas logos too. Although… I guess that’s kind of a snake too.

    Comment by Rene Dudfield — Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 @ 11:15 pm

  4. And Linux refers to a person, not a Penguin.
    GNU-Emacs refers to a recursive negative, not a horned animal.
    PERL is an acronym, not a calcium deposit in a mollusk.
    YACC is an acronym, not an animal.
    BISON is a joke on YACC and not an ani… wait a moment….
    RUBY was a joke on PERL and not a ge…. crap, bugger off…

    Comment by Doug Napoleone — Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 @ 11:20 pm

  5. And your suggestion is …

    Comment by Paulo — Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 @ 11:33 pm

  6. And I thought we could count on Pythonistas to have one way of doing things…now we see not just one mistake, but two! Snakes AND frogs? What’s this world coming to?

    Comment by Charles Oliver Nutter — Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 @ 11:50 pm

  7. When Tim Parkin designed the logo he specifically intended the blue and yellow symbols to be readable as a “p” and a “y”. Since the design was introduced there has been remarkably little controversy about it. The only issue I can remember was when someone suggested it looked too cross-like, and might therefore be interpreted as a statement of religious preference.

    All of which pretty much goes to show that you can please some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, bur you can’t please all of the people all of the time.

    Please regard it as an abstract symbol!

    Comment by Steve Holden — Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 @ 12:07 am

  8. Actually 5 brits and an American.

    Comment by Joe Pantuso — Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 @ 12:24 am

  9. At the risk of thinking in a circular manner, I have to ask, if the Monty Python comedy troupe had nothing to do with snakes, why did they name themselves after a snake?

    Comment by Carl T. — Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 @ 2:17 am

  10. Oooh* the pain…

    Oh that was hilarious! I suppose next we have to take on GNU for what a gnu looks like and Gnome for not having an accurate representation of a gnome’s footprint… I hope it’s never my turn for this meme!

    Comment by Penguin Pete — Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 @ 5:30 am

  11. The frog shown here is what the Python Foundation refers to as a “snake” (though it looks more like a frog), more specifically a blue/yellow one.

    Well. as long as it’s a crunchy frog…

    Comment by Henk — Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 @ 6:23 am

  12. Maybe it’s a crunchy frog.

    Comment by Jim M — Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 @ 7:15 am

  13. Actually 6 brits since Terry Gilliam has renounced his US citizenship as a protest against the Bush administration.

    Comment by meow — Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 @ 7:22 am

  14. I’ve had enough. This started off as a perfectly good observation. But now it’s just silly.

    Comment by neil — Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 @ 9:16 am

  15. Heh… Everyone knew this I bet… But it’s just so _funny_ to draw lovely n’ silly snakes too. And please don’t come and tell me that I ignore who the Monty Python are! –I’m a big fun :)

    Comment by Karim — Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 @ 9:18 am

  16. Uhm, not to mention it was actually you putting the snake on the wiki page. I am not responsible for the forum logo, it was like it from the beginning. I like it, though.

    Comment by Marek Kubica — Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 @ 10:58 am

  17. I guess the perfect logo would be a “funny walk” and the the tag line should be
    “If I say you have a beautiful body would you hold it against mine?”

    Comment by Rui Ferreira — Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 @ 11:12 am

  18. It is easier to make a logo/picture of a snake than of a circus, much less a flying circus. I rolled my own Python (snake) logo. You can see it at http://www.ferg.org/pyfdate/index.html

    Comment by Steve Ferg — Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 @ 12:39 pm

  19. http://www.flickr.com/photos/hackaday/1327535099/ — monty python — python

    Comment by Justin Lilly — Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 @ 1:12 pm

  20. In a recorded interview, Guido himself said that he long resisted the tendency to represent Python with snakes, insisting that Monty Python imagery be used instead. But then O’Reilly wrote their first Python book, and had to design a cover. All of their covers use animals, and even Guido had to admit that it only made sense to put a (snake) Python on the cover. After that, the snake was out of the bag (so to speak).

    Comment by Ned Batchelder — Thursday, May 1st, 2008 @ 1:31 am

  21. Doug Napoleone said “PERL is an acronym, not a calcium deposit in a mollusk.”

    Nope, Perl (note the way it is cased) is not an acronym. Perl was original to be named Pearl after one of Larry Wall’s relatives, but there was already a software project named Pearl, so he dropped the a. The bacronyms “Practical Extraction and Reporting Language” and “Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister” both came well after the naming of the language.

    Comment by Chas. Owens — Monday, May 5th, 2008 @ 7:00 am

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