Python Evangelism

[Paul Boddie]

John Pote wrote:
>
> Over this side of the pond the good old British Post Office changed its name
> to 'Consignia' in 2001.

I thought it was actually the Royal Mail, but the brand history can be
found here:

http://www.royalmailgroup.com/aboutus/aboutus8.asp

The fact that people confuse "Royal Mail" with "Post Office" might
suggest something to brand experts, but I'd argue that pulling one of
the names out of use, especially the one people tend not to use (but
the one they've now chosen for the parent company), would suggest
something else to normal people: it would either weaken the dual-named
"superbrand" or merely be regarded with contempt. Examples can be found
for this and other re-branding cases quite readily on the Internet, but
don't search for 'Consignia "Royal Mail"' in Google, though, as it
seems to result in a bizarre error page:

"""
We're sorry...
... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer
virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process
your request right now.
"""

Anyway, aside from bizarre technical moments like this, what you've
described can probably be termed "brand suicide": the scrapping of a
recognisable brand identity with something fashionable at a particular
point in time that looks dated within a few years, and which has people
wondering who they're doing business with (despite extensive
publicity), only to discover that it's been the same company all along.

[...]

> what's in a name? fortran, algol, rexx, hope, haskell, pascal, modula,
> eiffel, B, C, J, tcl, pearl, ruby, rebol, cobol, basic, vb, .net, assembler,
> forth, snobol, ada, prolog, simula, smalltalk, oberon, dylan, bob, ML et al
> ad nauseum.
>  - is Python any less meaningful? Anyway I LIKE the chesse shop sketch!

The problem with the Cheese Shop name, aside from sounding ridiculous,
is that it isn't self-explanatory in an area which needs
self-explanatory labelling. Consider the following conversations:

A: "I need to find something in Python that does this."
B: "Have you tried the Python Package Index?"
A: "Don't know why I didn't think of that!"

A: "I need to find something in Python that does this."
B: "Have you tried the Cheese Shop?"
A: "WTF is that?"
[Lengthy, embarrassed explanation follows.]

Bizarre names may be cute (to some people) but they don't lend
themselves to guessing or searching. Consequently, people who want
answers yesterday aren't likely to be amused to eventually discover
that the name of the resource they've been looking for is some opaque,
three-levels-of-indirection-via-irony, in-crowd joke. And even acronyms
like CPAN are better than wacky names, anyway.

Paul