Teen sells Perl cloud startup to ActiveState Meet Daniil Kulchenko. He was an HTML programmer at age six. He was a freelance Linux systems administrator at 11. And at 15, he founded his first business: Phenona, a platform-as-a-service for building and hosting Perl applications. Now, Kulchenko has sold Phenona to dynamic language specialist ActiveState for an undisclosed …
Wish I had done something substantial when I was younger rather than just dicking around... At uni in '98, I created a web site (with a C backend!) where my old school friends had their own page, and we could post messages on it, a sort of 'profile' and 'wall' you could say... oh well :)
LOL not to tar ActiveState (I'm actually friends with the founder, Dick Hardt - best name in IT) but it's far from an "enterprise" :-)
But yes I did create and sell a company before going to university (fortunately a bit later though, at 20, so I could understand and sign contracts). But I guess The Register had no interest in Postscript interpreters and Computer to Plate print workflow systems.
So I guess the Z80 assembly paid off.
Now Perl stuff.. meh... outside of the regexp engine that is. Top kudos to those few who venture into that dark realm.
You mean this note "Kulchenko told The Register that a number of large companies are evaluating the service, with sites getting "millions of hits a month".
That's as clear as mud, so you did well in adding the apparently.
I'm just afraid of what dad and mom's influence may have done to this kid. Like another comment said, 7 is the wrong age to approach a swiss army knife like Perl.
Sure he sold the company (and how much of that money is now dad's) plus he gets a part-time job to work more on Perl. It's just too much of the same thing, at his age he should be looking at diversifying his tools a little.
I love Perl, used it for 10 years, ran the local club, the lot, but can see how there are better things out there, except for quick and dirty stuff.
Perl 6 effectively killed Perl 5's future. His dedication would be best invested elsewhere.
I can't agree that this is something we should encourage on children. I didn't teach mine Z80 code for example.
I don't know if there's much advice an older programmer can give such a self-learner, but if he wants one suggestion (from someone who doesn't know him at all), I'd advise against doing the computer science degree. Not because CS isn't useful - it is. But so much of CS degrees these days aren't really CS, they're just getting people up to the level of being a basic programmer which this guy clearly doesn't need. He should do Maths. Or if he has a particular area he wants to target his skills at (e.g. physics, economics, whatever), then whatever degree is relevant. Then if he wants to study computer science, he can use that degree to bump him straight into a MSc. which might be more at his level. Sure, there's good stuff at BSc. level, such as complexity of algorithms, but a lot of the content will be wasted on him.
On the other hand, maybe he just wants to drink beer and have fun, in which case he'll be able to coast through a computer degree with much more time for such activities. But I'm guessing he's the "achiever" sort of student. ;)
Pint for the lad, anyway.
From the article: "It was his dad, a proficient Perl programmer, who got him coding on early Perl apps at seven."
His dad - Pavel Kulchenko - actually co-wrote O'Reilly's book on "Programming Web Services with Perl" so I can see where he got his ideas... guess it helps when your dad already knows most of the answers.
After all that Perl I think a good computer science degree will do him well and can actually be challeging. There are still a few good ones around. Hopefully his parents would have saved the money from this sale to fund his education.
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