Esper — Find more time in your day with smart calendar analytics

@_jacksmith Popular question! We're working on pricing, which will be up in the near future. Our beta users have paid $100/month, but we plan to add on additional features like our mobile app and some power-user features (like deep integration with calendar), so it may cost more or less depending on the tier. We're still early, so any feedback would be welcome!

@_andrewlee Hey, this looks really useful, but I can't seem to find pricing anywhere- just that there is a 30 day free trial... Do you have a pricing section?

@mazlix @_andrewlee Pricing is coming soon. Our beta users have paid $100/month, but we plan to add on additional features like our mobile app and some power-user features (like deep integration with calendar), so it may cost more or less depending on the tier . We’ll have pricing up soon and before the 30-day trial is over.

@mjambon I've been meaning to ask: how does using an obscure language affect the engineering interns you get? Do they ramp up? Did they already know OCaml?

@ikirigin We've had 3 technical interns so far, all from Waterloo. None of them had previous exposure to OCaml or to a language of the same broad family (SML, F#, Haskell). They picked up the language very fast and this was actually a surprise to me. They had already some familiarity with other functional programming languages and with asynchronous programming in JavaScript. Also the kind of programming we do in our backend doesn't involve any esoteric algorithms. It's really about keeping our data and API in order and making the database and the software easy to maintain. I believe a major barrier of adoption for OCaml is the lack of a unique framework that provides a canonical solution to set up a web application in a few minutes. I don't think it's easy to come up with such a framework. It would take a lot of work, iterations, and polishing to provide something that could be distributed and that would work for everyone. We are very happy that we can pick excellent tools for ourselves, but it requires knowledge and the kind of experience that people new to programming don't have. With interns I find that code reviews are mostly about general software engineering, naming things, putting things in the right place, security issues, avoiding disastrously inefficient designs, being aware of a million things that guide software design. I had them redo their initial implementations too many times because of this and because they're fast and impatient. This hasn't much to do with the OCaml language or ecosystem. Finally I should mention the reason why we use OCaml: it's primarily because it has full type inference. It allows the programmer to write code as they would in python without type annotations, but the compiler infers the type of values and functions and checks for their compatibility. Type checking makes large-scale refactoring very easy as any mistake is reported by the compiler. Other reasons include ease of use of a functional style, possibility to program in a straightforward imperative style when it's more convenient, and performance. We have a more complete blog post on the subject here: http://tech.esper.com/2014/07/15...