[LA.pm] contrasting London and LA

[Jeremy Leader]

on 08/14/2006 10:28 AM James Pitts  wrote:
> Perl seems to be a strong thread throughout the Idealabs companies. For
> those of you who worked at Shopzilla, eToys, and Citysearch, do you
> know any of the history about how Bill Gross' companies became perl
> shops? Was there a perl advocate from Caltech or JPL on the Idealabs
> staff? 
> 
> Or has LA been a good place for perl merely because it became ubiq in
> the online porn industry :)
> 
> - James

I worked with Dan Kegel at Knowledge Adventure, Bill Gross's edutainment
CDROM (and floppy!) company before the start of Idealabs.  This was around
'93 to '95.  Dan was a big Perl and open source advocate; as a result, we
had a fair number of internal tools and scripts, originally written in Perl 4.
Dan also set up KA's first web site, and mentored quite a few interns, some
of whom went on to other Idealabs companies, including CitySearch, New.net,
and Evolution Robotics.  I believe Dan was probably the first person to
expose Bill Gross to Perl.

-- 
Jeremy Leader
jleader at alumni.caltech.edu
leaderj at yahoo-inc.com (work)