Perl Logo

By Xah Lee. Date: 2022-09-27. Last updated: 2023-05-27.

Here's perl camel, used as the cover art of perl book published by O'Reilly.

this svg version of perl logo, created in 2021, bear very little resemblance to the spirit of the original.

Perl logo, a svg version created in 2021. ❮https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Perl_language_logo.svg❯

Around 2012, when perl is pretty much dead, someone started to use a raptor as perl logo.

Perl5Raptor logo. Alternative perl logo. Date: 18 January 2012. 〔image source https://github.com/kraih/perl-raptor〕 by Sebastian Riedel

perl raptor logo used as favicon, on perl.com , 2022-11-02

2022-11-05

Perl Logo History

Perl logo, is a fight between the open source anti money spirit, vs the O'REILLY commercial entity.

O'REILLY published several perl books, reigning supreme in popularity in 1990s. and they used a camel on the cover for their perl books. that camel, became perl's logo, and then became a trademark owned by O'REILLY.

Perl Books Survey 2002

Around y2k, perl is at the height of its popularity, basically the world's top 3 most popular languages. (the other 2 are C and C++.) Huge fan base, basically majority of programers.

But there is a problem. perl mongers want to use the logo on their website, but the trademark owner fear they would lose control of the logo.

So, what O'REILLY did, was to create a page with elaborate appeasing essay, to let people use the logo, yet, retain full control of the logo by law. This happened around y2k.

here's a remnant screenshot of those pages. note, these are not how originally it looks like around y2k, but many years later, because the LAMP jargon of “onlamp.com” on the page was much later thing O'REILLY tried to capture money from.