On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 3:01 PM, Daniel Carrera <[email protected]> wrote:
> Updated.
>
> Btw, as of now we have 18 voters. So quite a few people have expressed
> their opinion with this poll.
>
> I must admit that I don't know how we are going to agree on the final
> logo here. We might need the "benevolent dictator for life" to jump in
> and make a few executive decisions.
>


I really appreciate Daniel's perseverance, enthusiasm and hard work in
pursuing this and the general web site updates. With that out of the
way, the following is completely my opinion.

I haven't voted for any logo because I personally don't think any of
the logos are good enough (yes, not even the ones I myself
contributed). None of them quite capture what PDL is about, nor convey
what it can do. Christian's PDL prompt is probably the best of the
lot, but while it conveys a sophistication and seriousness of the
tool, it doesn't do justice to it beyond reducing it to a command
prompt.

I personally don't think a logo is created via a committee. It is just
one of those creative exercises that is best left to a trained logo
designer who (metaphorically) sits down with a few of the serious
developers/users/and of course, the original creator of PDL, gets
their views, and then tries to capture it all in an icon.

Once again, I reiterate, in my view PDL without a logo is better than
PDL with a bad logo.

PDL is coming of age. It has existed for a while, but now it is
attracting non-traditional users, folks such as me, with no background
in the traditional PDL disciplines. Chris Marshall (and Matt Kenworthy
and others) are doing great work in making the installs easy and
easier. The documentation is getting hammered into good shape. A new
version of the PDL book, htmlized and all, would be great. The PDL map
does a useful job of showing the spatial and disciplinary spread of
PDL, but sadly it is underpopulated -- I mean, if PDL has less than
two dozen users around the world then it probably is not worth the
development effort. I really doubt that is the case though, but where
are the rest of the users? Why are they not submitting their data? Are
they not aware of this list? Are they not aware of the PDL map?

In my view, PDL is really one of the most exciting things about Perl.
It makes Perl as fast as C, and makes complicated algorithms and
techniques as easy as Perl. It really deserves the front-page on Perl,
on par with DBI.

Coming back to the logo -- my personal wish is that once a small set
of possible logos is identified, then the senior developers, perhaps
Karl (if he has the time), contact some Perl/opensource friendly logo
designer and see if she/he would lend their chops to doing a logo
worthy of PDL.

Ok. With that, once again, my deep appreciation for Daniel and others'
enthusiasm about making PDL and "its looks" better.


-- 
Puneet Kishor http://www.punkish.org
Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org
Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org
Science Commons Fellow, http://sciencecommons.org/about/whoweare/kishor
Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu
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