I can't believe perl 6 isn't even close to being out. I'm an old perl hacker from way back. It is nice to see new features in perl. Perl isn't as sexy as Python & Ruby these days but it still powers much of the web. The CPAN library is still far above than what any other language offers. If any of you have never hacked up some perl code, i can't recommend it enough.
Actually, Rakudo, the Perl 6 implementation on the Parrot VM is out and the development team has announced development release #21 for it.
Its probably not the best choice for production work right now, but the development and improvement is going on at a rapid pace. Be sure to check out http://rakudo.org/
Has there been any point in time at which Perl 6 was not developing "at a rapid pace"?
Promises that Perl 6 will be available Real Soon got worn out in about 2006. Wake me when something's production ready. The entire Python 3 process has gone from idea, to preliminary implementation process, to release, and almost certainly a 3.1 release while Perl 6 has been "rapidly developing" and out at "Christmas" (yes, I know the nature of the "joke", except I consider it a joke in the pejorative sense; the funny sense wore out in 2006 too).
And if I had to place money on which will be out first, Python 3.2 or Perl 6, it's Python in a heartbeat.
> Has there been any point in time at which Perl 6 was not developing "at a rapid pace"?
Pre-2005, yes. If you care to look at the commit and spectest graphs on Rakudo.org (for example), you can see the activity levels continue to grow since December 2007.
> The entire Python 3 process has gone from idea, to preliminary implementation process, to release, and almost certainly a 3.1 release while Perl 6 has been "rapidly developing" and out at "Christmas"....
Nonsense. Guido switched jobs in spring 2000 in part to focus on Python 3000. Perl 6 wasn't even announced then.
But part of the reason Python 3 wasn't "very ambitious" is that the people building it actually accounted for what could be done, and made a distinction between "what would be nice" and "what we actually need". It's been a careful, controlled upgrade process that actually works in the real world. It really is everything that Perl 6 hasn't been.
In my considered opinion, the way that Perl 5 is partially evolving into Perl 6 even before Perl 6 is out is further evidence that a big bang was neither necessary nor desirable. There would be at least one discontinuity point, just like there is for Python 3, but that's manageable.
I'm sure Perl 6 will eventually be released, which is not something I'd say about most projects in this state, but I don't think the perl community is doing itself any favors if it fools itself into thinking this went well. It didn't. Perl 6's process has been a disaster. This point needs to be made.
I'm a professional perl programmer and don't want to see the language die, and it's been frustrating watching Perl 6 try so hard to kill it. As an open source project, they have every right to take as long as they like, I'm not trying to infringe any freedoms, but I have every right to say what I see, and what I see is not flattering at all.
> In my considered opinion, the way that Perl 5 is partially evolving into Perl 6 even before Perl 6 is out is further evidence that a big bang was neither necessary nor desirable.
I disagree strongly.
If you look at what I've called the milestones in the Perl renaissance, you can trace at least half of them (if not more) back to Perl 6.
If you like modern Perl, you owe Perl 6 a huge debt of gratitude.
I see no basis for this interpretation. Perl 6 has not been detrimental to Perl 5. Perl 5 and its ecosystem has remained perfectly competitive with all relevant alternatives. What was supposed to have happened in Perl 5 in recent years that didn't?
Perl 6 is an ambitious attempt to create a new language and infrastructure for the next ten years (unfortunately on a shoestring budget). The only valid question is whether this was something worth pursuing at all.
Third, launch then get feedback, interate quickly. I was scared when I launched my startup, but you will realize it takes time to get users to try your service out. We were lucky to get techcrunched before launch which led to a bunch of signups for our beta. So we had about 2000 users on our list prior to launching.
I started out keeping the day job and building on the side. After awhile it gets old and you lose all motivation for the day job. Since moving to working on the startup full time I have never been happier in my life. I wake up every day living the dream and have no plans on looking back. Unfortunately my co-founder is still working a day job, but we are close to getting him working full time on our little project.
+1
Im not sure how someone can do justice to the day job as well as the side projects. Over a period of time, you start thinking about your side project during the day job and vice versa.
IMO, having more than one job is just going to split your thoughts and wouldnt help much in either of them.
> IMO, having more than one job is just going to split your thoughts and wouldnt help much in either of them.
It is true that it is going to split your thoughts and it gets really, really tiring.
But it can help if in your job-related projects you start seeing patterns of what people want, how to please them, how to talk to them to get details about their business that they forgot to mention, etc ...
The implementation of your side-projects suffers for sure, but you can gain a lot of knowledge from your social interactions with clients. I used to hate consultancy work for many reasons, but the bottom line is that I learned a lot too.
I guess the answer to this question (quitting your day-job or not) is the same useless and moronic answer given to all things complicated ... it depends.
Hahaa...that's definitely happening to me now. I find myself sneaking out to my car making calls to potential clients to schedule demos, etc. You do lose motivation and the mind wanders... :(
I think that doing consulting while doing the side project -- which is what they did, and we're doing -- is much more manageable.
For most consulting agencies, there's no single client you always work with, so you have more variety of projects, less drudgery. And, assuming your field is related to your project, it's more likely that the consulting work will feed back into learning things that help you build your own stuff.
It's still pretty annoying, of course. Especially doing customer support for our side project is problematic.
But I personally think that doing our own projects has helped us get better, easier-to-work-with clients.
And if we had tried to force Freckle to pay our bills (there are four of us) right away, we would have had to make many more compromises than we have.
On the balance, I'd say we could be dealing better with the situation, but I certainly wouldn't have done the quit-the-dayjob thing myself.
This is almost an exact replica of my startup http://edmodo.com which is completely free for multiple groups (eduset charges for more than 1 group), and already has decent traction with 87,000 registered users.
Jeff, I have to say, I'm kind of disappointed you chose to say that it is an "exact replica" publicly. As I said in my email to you some time ago, I had the idea for Eduset having never even heard of Edmodo, and only discovered Edmodo about halfway through the process of building Eduset. While I was certainly stunned at how similar the ideas were, I decided that the classroom microblogging space was big enough for more than one player, so I continued work.
Further, for the record, the inspiration for Eduset came from Pownce. When I first tried the Pownce closed beta, I realized that its model would apply perfectly to the classroom setting.
Edit 2: I'd like to emphasize again that I sent Jeff a long and detailed email about this exactly 3 weeks ago, containing everything I've said here and more. He confirmed to me that he received the email, but has yet to reply. For him to then take the debate public here, without bothering to talk to me personally, is unnecessary and absurd.
I actually have proof you signed up for Edmodo in October or November of last year, so you new about Edmodo almost a year ago. The classroom micro-blogging space may be big enough for two but we are more motivated than ever to own the educational micro-blogging space which we are already doing a very good job at it. I'm just letting the Hacker News users the similarities between your service and ours and ours is free unlike yours and we have a business model too :) We put our money where our mouth is and making the Education community a better place by offering the best free micro-blogging we can for individual teachers.
If you want to get into proof, here is proof that I got the inspiration for Eduset exactly a year earlier than I signed up for Edmodo: http://grab.by/5A5
Also, it is painful for me to see you painting me as a villain here. Why are you implying that I'm not "putting my money where my mouth is", that I'm not also trying to make the education community a better place? As I said above, you are planning to launch paid features, so please don't try to make it seem like I am doing teachers a disservice by charging a small amount.
By charging for your service, you're actually rather protecting your users — a free service is much more likely to suddenly disappear from the face of the web when it's too far into the red. And certainly, that wouldn't be appreciated by those users who have come to rely on the service. Maybe you should even put that into your marketing copy: it not being free is a feature.
Jeff, I understand that you're passionate about Edmodo, just as I'm passionate about Eduset. And it's very true that all startups are derivative to a certain extent. However, I have to correct you: you did say I stole your idea. Here's your tweet from September 2nd:
I agree, silly rants like this is absurd and really doesn't do any good and is not productive. Execution is key. I'm little passionate about my startup and that is why I replied. I never said he stole our idea. I said "almost" exact replica. Facebook borrows from twitter, eduset borrows from pownce, we borrow from twitter, facebook, friendfeed.
Yes, we can co-exist as healthy competitors. I'm usually not one for silly rants, my passion has gotten the better of me tonight. Edmodo, Eduset, and The Education Community as a whole is better served by us putting our energies into execution of our startups.
Based on what you've written here, as an outsider: Your audience is not the HN audience. What people think of you here in terms of copying is completely irrelevant. (Also, copying is fine. Everybody copies, sometimes entire business ideas.) Your customers, who I assume are school administrators and teachers don't care which came first or who copies who. If you look at school admins, they probably don't even care about features, to win them over you need a good salesmen. Also, X always pointing out how he came first and his is better then Y is just good marketing, because whenever people see Y they also see X and are more likely to compare the two. Saying X is better is hardly evil, it's just marketing. (Remember the Apple vs. PC ads? Remember the news about how Microsoft wants to build stores right next to Apple stores? You're living it.) In the end I think you will need to sell packages to schools to make real money, and in that case it's not even going to be about features but about a good salesman with connections. That's what you get for making a product aimed at the goverment. Cheers.
I agree; its not the idea that makes the product (or service) but rather the execution. Jeff should simply concentrate his time on bettering his own venture. Consider a similar venture nothing short of flattery.
I wish both Eduset.com and Edmodo.com the best of luck with their ventures - let the execution begin.
Jeff, Will has already explained to you multiple times in both in public and private that Eduset is not a copy of Edmodo and both products were developed independently of each other. Kindly lay the fuck off and quit advertising your startup at every mention of Eduset.
Will and I both developed a teacher classroom web interface independently of each other. The difference is that I didn't lay claim to the idea and become a dick about it.
BTW, your comparison of Eduset and Edmodo is like a comparison between the Zune and the iPod. You might as well accuse Classleaf of similar 'exact replica'-tion.
Moreover, even if he did copy the idea... who cares? Ideas are a dime a dozen... whoever executes best will win... assuming there is a winner. Seems like a space that several players could comfortably operate for quite a while.
Also, accusing someone of copying your site is rather ballsy considering that both sites look like repurposed Facebook clones. At least the eduset guy changed the color from blue to green. ;)
(Not that there is anything inherently wrong with that, but you don't exactly have a unique style that got ripped off.)
Did a quick search for Eduset. From the blogs I have read this dude Jeff just spams "Rip off of Edmodo", "Not impressed", etc. everytime somebody posts about this thing.
I have no relationship to either, but pretty scummy practice IMO.
SchoolRack has been around for years and is doing ~10K daily visitors. Both of these services do a lot of what we do... We're not bitching! :) Bring on the competition! The Education space needs some attention.
Whalesalad, totally agree, Education startups are lacking. I'm very impressed with the new Schoolrack release. Hey we are getting close to you guys :) http://www.quantcast.com/edmodo.com
