The Pythonistas are Wrong

written on Tuesday, April 29, 2008

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:

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.

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.

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

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.