[LA.pm] contrasting London and LA

[Eric Hammond]

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? 

I am pretty sure I can take credit for being the first Perl advocate
at the first Idealab company.  I was one of the first technology folks
hired at Citysearch and was writing and pushing Perl there in July 1996.  
I was previously coding Perl (and C, C++, etc) in Cincinnati before 
Caskey (18 at the time) asked me to move to LA for Citysearch.

Though the Citysearch development team was not able to switch the front 
end to Perl until after I left, we did code large chunks of the back 
end in Perl and ended up with quite a few Perl lovers who spread out to
other companies in the area.  In particular two groups of developers
left Citysearch and went to eToys (an Idealab company) and Rent.com
(not an Idealab company).

I don't know how Perl became popular at other Idealab companies and 
the rest of LA.  I'm sure it wasn't any one person's influence unless 
you count Larry.

--
Eric Hammond
ehammond at thinksome.com