To be fair, it's a pretty nice piece of work -- functional programming fans everywhere should be happy -- but for me, it's the hype that's disturbing.
When I involuntarily left GE Research (and later, when I left the National Center for Porkworking Technology quite voluntarily), I interviewed at Molten Metal Technologies. They had a cool process for destroying nasty organics by dumping them in a molten steel bath. They had a bunch of technical snags, lost their friend in the Department of Energy, and went bankrupt not longer after my second interview. What was most interesting to me was that they built a multi-million $ company, with hundreds of people employed at several sites, on an approach that was essentially never going to be profitable based on the fundamental thermodynamics. One friend, using a simple spreadsheet based on a back-of-the-envelope level calculation, showed that they could never make money in the waste disposal business. It took the DoE and the stock market about 4 years after he did this calculation to figure this out as well.
Ken Meltsner
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Bone [mailto:jbone@jump.net]
Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2001 1:58 PM
To: fork@xent.com
Subject: Curl
So how the hell do you get $52M in funding for implementing a typed
Scheme-a-like in a browser plug-in, with curly braces replacing parens
and a TeX rip-off DOM?
:shakes head in amazement...
jb
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:14:12 PDT