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CUFP notes, 2014
Oct. 14th, 2014 02:47 pmLong overdue, here are my notes on the talks at CUFP 2014 (September 6, 2014). This is the last in a series of conference write-up posts from me that cover CUFP, the Haskell Symposium, Erlang Workshop, and the three days of ICFP itself. CUFP is the workshop for Commercial Users of Functional Programming, and I was honored to have served on the program committee for it this year.
Joe Armstrong's invited talk, "Making Money with FP", was quite entertaining... for the most part anyway. His comment that you can't sell a language, and must sell a project written in it, harked back for me to working at Laszlo Systems in 2005.
He made the point, about adoption of FP, that "nobody ever got sacked for using Microsoft products (or Java, or C++" -- also this gem, "You get paid based on the number of people you manage, so people hate the idea that ten Haskell programmers can do what 100 C++ programmers can do." (I'm not confident that that generalization always holds, but it does seem to be true in my experience.)
One aside that marred an otherwise great talk was an unnecessary use of "guys" on a slide, when Armstrong said (while speaking to the same slide) "technical guys enjoy an argument". One or the other and I might have let it slide, but not all "technical guys" enjoy an argument, plus technical women who enjoy arguments are punished for that while technical women who don't enjoy arguments tend to get steamrolled.
Then, Armstrong went on to talk about different business models for making money from FP. Most of this advice seemed broadly applicable, but it was still good to hear it coming from one of the people who is most qualified to talk about "how to make money with FP". He implied, I think, that the best two routes for a person trying to get into business with FP were either a consultancy (where you are an independent businessperson who sells consulting hours or services to other companies) or a development/R&D company where the goal is to "develop a product and sell it to a bigger company that can sell it." He explained how a good way to gain a reputation is to participate in the standardization of a language or framework: either choose a new standard or invent one of your own, and then make the best and first implementation. Then, you sell or give away software to build your reputation (which is why you can't sell a language, I guess!) and finally, sell the company :D
( Read more... )
Joe Armstrong's invited talk, "Making Money with FP", was quite entertaining... for the most part anyway. His comment that you can't sell a language, and must sell a project written in it, harked back for me to working at Laszlo Systems in 2005.
He made the point, about adoption of FP, that "nobody ever got sacked for using Microsoft products (or Java, or C++" -- also this gem, "You get paid based on the number of people you manage, so people hate the idea that ten Haskell programmers can do what 100 C++ programmers can do." (I'm not confident that that generalization always holds, but it does seem to be true in my experience.)
One aside that marred an otherwise great talk was an unnecessary use of "guys" on a slide, when Armstrong said (while speaking to the same slide) "technical guys enjoy an argument". One or the other and I might have let it slide, but not all "technical guys" enjoy an argument, plus technical women who enjoy arguments are punished for that while technical women who don't enjoy arguments tend to get steamrolled.
Then, Armstrong went on to talk about different business models for making money from FP. Most of this advice seemed broadly applicable, but it was still good to hear it coming from one of the people who is most qualified to talk about "how to make money with FP". He implied, I think, that the best two routes for a person trying to get into business with FP were either a consultancy (where you are an independent businessperson who sells consulting hours or services to other companies) or a development/R&D company where the goal is to "develop a product and sell it to a bigger company that can sell it." He explained how a good way to gain a reputation is to participate in the standardization of a language or framework: either choose a new standard or invent one of your own, and then make the best and first implementation. Then, you sell or give away software to build your reputation (which is why you can't sell a language, I guess!) and finally, sell the company :D
( Read more... )