Paul Graham

Paul Graham (1964) is an English Lisp programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist. He is also known for his work on Lisp, for being a co-founder of Viaweb (which was sold to Yahoo Inc. in 1998 for around $49 million), and for also being a co-founder of Y Combinator, a private equity firm. seed. He is the author of On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers and Painters (2004).

Education

After graduating with a BA from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Applied Science with a concentration in Computer Science from Harvard, he studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.

Biography

In 1995, together with his friend from Cornell, Robert Tappan Morris, a well-known hacker, famous for creating the Morris Worm that had caused serious problems on the Internet in 1988, he founded Viaweb, the first company to provide application services (ASP). Viaweb's flagship product (written entirely in Common Lisp) allowed its users to create their own Internet stores. In the summer of 1998, they sold the company to Yahoo! for 455,000 shares of the company, equivalent to about $49 million dollars. Then the product would be called Yahoo! Store.

Thereafter he began writing essays on his website, with topics ranging from "Beating Averages", which compares Lisp to other programming languages, to "Why nerds are unpopular", which is about life as nerds in high school. A collection of his essays was published as Hackers and Painters (ISBN 0-596-00662-4) from O'Reilly publishing house.

In 2001, he announced that he is working on a new programming language called Arc, a dialect of Lisp for talented programmers. As part of his work with Arc, he started developing an email client when he decided he needed a good spam filter. His work resulted in an article called "A Plan for Spam," which helped popularize Bayesian spam filters.

In 2005, after giving a talk at the Harvard Computer Society, (later published as "How to Start a Startup") he and Morris, along with Jessica Livingston, whom Graham would marry in In 2008, and a Viaweb employee, Trevor Blackwell, decided to create a business incubator called Y Combinator to provide seed capital to new startup companies, especially those started by young people with a more technical orientation. Some of its projects are Startup School, where famous personalities from the world of startups give talks to participants from all over the world; and the Summer/Winter Founders Program, aimed at university students and recent graduates who want to undertake a project during the summer or winter respectively. Y Combinator has invested in more than 200 startups, including reddit, Justin.tv, loopt, and Xoobni, as well as Dropbox and Airbnb.

In 2008, BusinessWeek included Paul Graham in its annual ranking of "The 25 Most Influential People on the Web".

Arc

In 2001, Graham announced that he was working on a new dialect of Lisp called Arc. Over the years he has published a number of essays describing the features or goals of the language, and some internal projects at Y Combinator have been written on Arc, most notably the Hacker News web forum and the news aggregator program.

In the essay 'Being Popular', Graham describes some of his goals for language. Although some of them are very general ('Arc must be 'hackable'', 'There must be good libraries'), he also gives some specific points. For example, believes that a language should be concise:

"It would not be far from the truth to say that a hacker who is about to write a program decides which language to use, at least unconsciously, based on the total number of characters that you will have to type. Although this is not exactly the way hackers think, a language designer would do well to act as if it were. "

He also said that it is better for a language to implement only a small number of "axioms", even when that means the language may not have features that large organizations want, such as object orientation (OOO). In fact, Graham considers OO to be useless because its methods and patterns are just 'good design', and he considers the language features used to implement OO partially wrong.

Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreements

Graham proposed a hierarchy of disagreement in an essay How to Disagree written in 2008, placing the types of argument in a seven-point hierarchy and noting that "if moving up the hierarchy of disagreement makes less mean people, that will make the majority happier. Graham also suggested that the hierarchy can be considered a pyramid, since the highest forms of disagreement are rarer.