Avdi B.Grimm <avdi / mycroft.localdomain.fake> wrote:
: Aslo, FWIW, I think the only impression many of the people I know would get 
: from an Anime babe as as a mascot would be that Ruby is a language for 
: pimply-faced, maladjusted computer nerds who live in their parent's basement 
: and have never had a girlfriend. ;-)

Is that a bad thing?  Some of those people are skilled hackers! :)

The only people who would derive that kind of impression are so biased
that they may be quite hostile to new computer languages.  Besides that,
we *are* geeks.  Get over it; it's a dumb idea to pretend we are all suave
international spy hacker aikido masters.
There are reasons against the anime mascot which do not play off people's
stereotypes.  Primarily among them:

'Ruby-chan' is just not a good drawing.  I have seen my share of anime,
and this is just not representative of the detail and quality of Japanese
animation.  So as a cultural referent it fails.

More importantly, human mascots are not a viable option for any kind of
abstract concept or thing.  Read Scott McCloud's work on symbolism for a
more detailed argument, but in short people attach meaning to an icon on
an axis of visual relevance or similarity.  We can all find a bit of
representation in a stick figure drawing of a person, but a phot of a
person is only representative of that person -- and thus not relevant to
anyone else.  Increasing subjectivity --> exclusion.

This factors into mascot choice because, being humans, we expect a human
drawing to be representative of a human.  It's just too subjective to be
used for anything else, in this case a computer language.  But a 'thing'
or idea, like Ruby, can be represented by things less subjective, like an
animal, or corundum Al2O3 with traces of Cr2O3, or even a pick-axe.

Show me a human mascot that has worked.