This is a poll about whether Julia should have an unofficial community mascot.
Since this topic has resurfaced repeatedly over the years without converging, I thought it might be useful to at least get a clearer signal on whether people want an unofficial mascot at all, and if so which candidates are actually preferred.
To be clear: this is not about changing Julia’s logo, official branding, or visual identity. The idea is just to see whether people would like some informal mascot figure for community use.
This is also just an informal Discourse poll. It is not meant to be binding, and it is obviously not a statistically representative vote for the entire Julia ecosystem.
The background discussion is here:
I’ve tried to reduce that long thread to a shortlist of candidates that seemed more serious or recurring than the rest. Please vote in all three polls.
Should Julia have an unofficial community mascot?
No
Yes
0voters
If yes, how would you rank these candidates?
Dragonfly / Julia skimmer
Julyax
Mantis shrimp (“Mantissa”)
Axolotl
Hummingbird
Butterfly / Julia heliconian
0voters
Does this shortlist cover the serious candidates well enough?
Yes
No, a serious candidate is missing
0voters
If you voted “No, a serious candidate is missing”, please mention it in the replies.
FAQ
I am collecting pointers to clarifying posts here for easier reference.
This poll is foremost trying to come to a closure regarding the cited discussion. The thread has been ongoing for some years. You will find some graphical proposals next to photos there.
At this stage and with this poll it is not a vote about logos, but about mascot-candidates. Hope this helps.
Clarifying question: as long as it is unofficial, why do people have to coordinate at all?
Since there is no consensus that a mascot is needed, and if yes, what it should be, anyone interested in the idea can just use whatever they like. Maybe with the right license others will take it up and one will emerge, or the whole idea dies out, let’s see what happens.
I agree with @Datseris, you explicitly added a question in the poll whether an other serious candidate was missing. I mentioned that one was missing, so why not add it?
Thanks for the question. I wrote “unofficial” intentionally:
Whatever comes out of this poll cannot make anything an official Julia mascot. Stating that up front lowers the stakes and the implications of participation.
If the community converges informally on something over time, that could in principle evolve further later — but only if there is clear interest in that.
Rust’s “Ferris” shows that a mascot does not have to be official in order to become distinctive, recognizable, and persistent.
Fair point to raise. I did see the “Dispatch” walkie-talkie idea in the old thread, but I deliberately treated this poll as a shortlist of the more serious creature/animal-like mascot proposals.
My reason is that, to me, a mascot is usually something a bit more personal and relatable — something with some kind of creature-like character — rather than just a clever symbol or visual pun. “Dispatch” is clever, but it strikes me more as a concept/emblem than as a mascot in that sense.
At this point I would prefer not to change the shortlist mid-poll, since that would make the result harder, not easier, to interpret.
The point of the third poll was precisely to detect whether people think a serious candidate is missing. If that turns out to be the case, that is useful information, and it would argue for a later follow-up poll with a revised shortlist rather than changing the current one while voting is already underway.
that would make the result harder, not easier, to interpret.
I’d agree with that so long as we’re only interested in an internally valid ranking of some options.
But if important candidates were missing in the first place according to the community, I don’t think we can claim that the community chose this mascot. Personally, I don’t think we should have specific criteria about what can and can’t be a mascot. If people like it, it works.
This poll cannot meaningfully generalize beyond the listed options if important candidates are missing. That is precisely why I included the separate poll asking whether the shortlist is adequate.
My main reason for posting this at all was that the old thread has been resurfacing on and off for years, with people continuing to add proposals while others were already effectively “voting” for earlier ones in plain text. At some point, it seemed better to at least impose a little structure on that.
So I would read the current poll in layers:
The most important question is whether people want an (unofficial) mascot at all.
The shortlist ranking is informative only conditional on the shortlist being regarded as reasonably adequate.
If many people think a serious candidate is missing, that is not a failure of the poll — it is one of the results of the poll.
If that turns out to be the case, then the sensible next step would not be to alter the current poll mid-stream, but to run a follow-up poll with a revised shortlist.
So I see this less as “the definitive final word” and more as a first attempt to move a long-running, loosely structured discussion toward some actual closure.
I’d like to add a suggestion, one that will probably be controversial but which is backed by an actual Julia package: the cthulhu creature. It has the advantage of not being taken by any other language, almost certainly. (See Cthulhu.jl.) Symbolizing the ability to access and reason about the low-level internals, type inference. Also it’s a creature that emerged from a New England imagination (a particularly fertile imagination – in Providence, RI, I think), like Julia’s birth at MIT.
