in reply to New mascot for Perl
A mascot for perl would have to emphasize its strengths: Portability, flexibility, and power. Perl is available for almost every platform in use today. Perl, in conjunction with CPAN allows you to address most problems. It may not be the best solution, but it'll help you produce a great temporary fix lickity-split. Finally, perl's text parsing features make jobs that would be monsters in C or Java easy.
The best ideas I've heard so far are the Swiss Army Knife and Duct Tape. One of my favorite lines ever is "Perl is the duct tape that holds the web together". The problems with depiction are numerous:
I'm pretty sure that Victorinox owns the copyright to the familiar red knife image, although they may be amenible to licensing. Copyright not withstanding, a Swiss Army Knife with all the blades extended and a Camel on the case would be pretty cool.
Duct Tape is less strongly copyrighted, but difficult to depict in a meaningful way. It's a roll of grey tape. How do you make that exciting and eye-catching? How do you distinguish it from a zero, a tire, or a doughnut?
Seems to me that the model to look to is Tux. He's instantly recognizable, easy to draw, and there are dozens if not hundreds of remixes that still scream "Linux!" Linus himself laid down some good guidelines in the above link. They're worth examining.
All that said, the Camel is already strongly associated with Perl. If there's a way to formalize that relationship without losing anything, why change?
-Logan
"What do I want? I'm an American. I want more."