I’m surprised no-one here has addressed the camel in the room yet.
Jokes aside, they’re distinct enough IMO. And it’s always nice to see some more flat camel silhouettes on a solid color as a logo lol. The camel oriented programming languages are the best and most pragmatic of their respective categories of course :)
I do wonder though, and maybe someone familiar with the history of the language can tell me because archives only go as far back as 1998, which got the camel association (number of humps aside) first, between caml and perl? The camel book was published in 1991, but by that time, heavy caml was 4–6 years old, and caml light was fresh out the oven.
A possibly interesting thing to consider is that the english word “camel” has two distinct french words it translates to: « chameau » (two-humped, as per ocaml’s logo) and « dromadaire » (one-hump, as per perl’s logo). And yes, there are ways to express this difference in english (bactrian camel and dromedary camel IIRC), but it’s a bit different from having distinct names with no common names that they can be both described as.
(French has one word for both turtle and tortoise, you have to add an adjective for sea/land. And there are many examples for either side of the phenomenon.)
Whichever came after didn’t really seem to overlap much to a native French speaker.
This got settled a long time ago as per number of humps (I thought I could find a more explicit discussion but CWN only returned this).
So Perl,
OCaml.
Also Perl got the single hump from the O’Reilly book (see these tidbits). At the beginning of the century there was also a french book by O’Reilly (which was made freely available and translated in english by volunteers), but it seems that the O’Reilly animal of that book was a horse (?!).
For the curious, the logo mentioned 20 years ago was this: Wayback Machine
Camels are kind of a weird horse if you think about it
I’m a big fan of the grass-smoking joe caml from the early days: this post doesn’t endorse smoking :P
Ha that remains my favourite one too.
I wasa big fan of -all- the “drop the e” names in the Caml lexicon, back in the day. Camlot, Chamau, I’m sure there are others I’ve forgotten.
Right. IIRC, the O’Reilly France designer said that the camel was already taken by the Perl book, but that the horse is the French camel…
I found a print run of the Caml Light 0.5 documentation, printed at Inria in september 1992, with a cover that features a drawing of a camel:
I’m pretty sure this was drawn by artist Georges Ouanounou, who was working as a graphics designer at Inria at that time.
I can’t think of any earlier use of camel pictures for Caml-related material.
This does explain why I had a bizarre conversation about horses to the US O’Reilly cover people a decade later. I couldn’t figure out why they thought a horse was a better substitute for a dromedary camel than a bactrian, but now it makes sense…
I’m just going to come out and say that a hors is objectively not a caml.
looks like we found the next april fool. Replacing all camels with horses on ocaml.org
So OCaml is a horse designed by a committee?
Hopefully the horse will be an Arabian at least.