Yegge on Branding (Marketing, eww)
Yegge gave a keynote at OSCON (which I didn't attend even though it's in my own back yard). You can watch it online (scroll down a ways and click on his picture). It's always weird to see and hear someone who's words you've only been reading for a while. He's pretty entertaining in person, but I still like his blog rants better. It was interesting what he said though. I've seen a few blog entries mention branding recently, you know, criticizing names like Haskell and Erlang, and this talk kind of solidified my understanding of how important brand is, even for geeky stuff like programming languages that are meant to be consumed by geeks, who, you would guess would think logically and choose on merits other than name. But they don't. I totally agree that Javascript needs a new name.