[SGVLUG] Possible talk

[Jeremy Leader]

Jean Chen wrote:
> On 5/18/06, Dustin Laurence <dustin at laurences.net> wrote:
>> I had an interesting experience last week talking with the Linspire
>> engineers.  I'm not now and have never been a Linspire user (Joe
>> McCarthy will be relieved :-), however their engineers are doing some
>> interesting things with,er, exotic languages like OCaml and Haskell in
>> building and booting Linspire.
> 
> Those are some obscure languages!  I'm surprised that Google still
> managed to give me a few ads for them!
> 
> Jean
> 
> The ads:
> 
>     Sponsored Links
> 
>     Functional Prog. Jobs
>     Erlang hackers welcome! Program in OCaml at Jane Street
>     www.janestcapital.com/ocaml.html
> 
>     Free Erlang Calculator
>     Model your call center staffing needs. What-if analysis, graphs
>     www.kooltoolz.com
> 
>     Phone Traffic Analysis
>     Free telecom resources, newsletter, ebooks, telecom news and more.
>     www.telconassociates.com

Those ads are amusing, given the context.  The first one is actually
looking for OCaml programmers to do financial modeling.  The other
two deal with telecom traffic analysis, for which one of the
standard mathematical models is named after a Norwegian mathematician
and telephone engineer named Erlang
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agner_Krarup_Erlang).

There happens to be a programming language named after him
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_programming_language), in the
same family as Haskell and OCaml, used I think by Ericsson to write
real-time software in telecom switches.

So Google somehow figured that if you're talking about Haskell and
OCaml, you're also interested in Erlang (the language); and people
interested in Erlang (the mathematician and his work) are often
interested in telecom modeling...

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