Code = Conversation » Entrepeneurship http://code.foo.no Public thinking about collaborative authoring, code and suchnot. Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:40:12 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 The business case for Perl 6 http://code.foo.no/2010/02/11/the-business-case-for-perl-6 http://code.foo.no/2010/02/11/the-business-case-for-perl-6#comments Thu, 11 Feb 2010 13:36:50 +0000 Salve J. Nilsen http://code.foo.no/?p=66 Perl 6 is about value creation, and value creation is a product of [people solving problems] and [efficiency of tools used to solve these problems] — effort * efficiency.

For a while the focus in the Perl 6 community has been on increasing efficiency, and mostly by improving expressiveness and efficient use of programmer attention. This has lead to powerful constructs like grammars, junctions, roles, a wonderful type system and the tests that go with that – both for making sure the features work as intended and that they can be used in a sensible manner.

The cool thing here is that these features work as a “community size force multiplier.” For people to be attracted to a tool, they need to see it’s more efficient than it’s competitors. Efficient in learnability, expressiveness, utility, execution and fun. Right now, Perl 6 has reached a level of interestingness that makes it extremely well suited for hype, and with Rakudo Star on the horizon (Q2 2010) I’m expecting the Perl 6 buzz to increase a lot. The force multiplyer is about to kick in. :)

Better features -> More buzz -> Bigger community -> Stronger business case.

When it comes to business case, language popularity is the prime driver. When someone needs to hire people, availability of these people is paramount. Bad code can be fixed, but not hiring that programmer is so much more expensive than having to fix bad code. So if one should look at the skills market today (with so very few people in the world knowing Perl 6) the business case for it is almost non-existant.

With this in mind, I’m still very happy to see the Perl 6 crowd taking the long view and create an incredibly cool language instead of just focusing on a tiny feature set and then creating buzz. The buzz will come all by itself, and when it does, Perl 6’s awesome force multiplier will kick in and the fun will really begin.

Perl 6 might be small right now, but I’d say the outlook for Perl 6 is nothing less than spectacular. :)

]]> http://code.foo.no/2010/02/11/the-business-case-for-perl-6/feed 0 Entrepeneurship 101 http://code.foo.no/2009/09/02/entrepeneurship-101 http://code.foo.no/2009/09/02/entrepeneurship-101#comments Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:08:27 +0000 Salve J. Nilsen http://code.foo.no/?p=36 I’ve followed a couple different entrepeneurship and business podcasts for a while now (oh my, I think we’re talking about 3-4 years!). Stanford’s “Entrepeneurial Thought Leaders” series, or “Peter Day’s World of Business” have been quite informative, but after listening to enough “war stories” I’m thinking  that there has to be a limit to how much I have to listen before I try doing something. I’ve been more interested in “learning from other people’s mistakes” than making my own, perhaps.

Time to do something! Two weeks ago I signed up for ENT1000 – the “Entrepeneurship” class at the Uni in Oslo. Our first class was about creativity (very fun.) Our second about building groups and communication (we made a Lego castle without talking, and everyone with their designated tasks to fill.)

In the meantime we got our first home assignment: Make a presentation/sales-pitch about one horribly bad product. Our product was “Contact lenses for flies,” and we made a story about the need to “humanely remove the files from your home, using our patent-pending UV filtering spray (that covers the fly’s eyes) and UV-emitting tape.”

The presentation went well. :)

Next, we’re supposed to try ourselves on something more serious and ambitious.

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