5 Reasons the Hedgehog (🦔) is a great F# mascot

Date: 2024-02-26 | create | tech | fsharp |

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

F# Hedgehog Petition on Twitter

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:

Want more like this?

The best / easiest way to support my work is by subscribing for future updates and sharing with your network.