Many programming languages have mascots. These are great for branding and fandom.

• Rust - Crab - 🦀
• Python - Snake - 🐍
• OCaml - Camel - 🐪

If there's one thing I think F# could get better at, it would be branding and marketing itself.

So in this post I'm going to share why the Hedgehog (🦔) would make a great F# mascot.

The F# Hedgehog

From SIRHAMY on Twitter.

Some reasons why the Hedgehog + F# are a good match.

• Standard Emoji - In order for a programming language mascot to be useful, it needs to have an emoji. This allows usage on more social platforms and thus is better for branding. The Hedgehog has one - 🦔.
• Sharp with good defenses - A hedgehog has lots of spikes and thus is Sharp. F# leans towards strongly-typed, value-based, and expressive domain modeling which generally leads to safer (and thus more defensive) programs than more mainstream imprecise types and exception-based flows.
• Small and Powerful - The hedgehog is tiny which matches F#'s concise ergonomics for safe, expressive logic.
• Lazy and sleeps a lot - Hedgehogs sleep upwards of 16 hours a day and also hibernate. F#'s ergonomics often let you get higher outcomes with lower work. Here laziness is a feature, not a bug.
• Can thrive in many environments - Hedgehogs can live in all sorts of environments from human gardens to forests to deserts. Similarly F# is a general programming language running on dotnet which makes it suitable for workloads of all kinds.

Bonus: Hedgehogs are fun just like F#.

Hedgehog facts from The San Diego Zoo

Next

We still don't have an official F# mascot yet so your input / support is needed to improve F#'s branding! You can give feedback on my F# mascot petition post.

If you liked this post you might also like:

• How I got interested in F#
• The best way to get started learning and building with F#
• Why I'm moving from SvelteKit to F#