Paul Graham (computer programmer)
| Paul Graham | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
13 November 1964 Weymouth, Dorset, England |
| Alma mater |
Cornell University Harvard University |
| Thesis | The State of a Program and Its Uses (1990) |
| Doctoral advisor | Thomas E. Cheatham Jr. |
| Spouse | Jessica Livingston |
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Website paulgraham |
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Paul Graham (born 13 November 1964) is an English computer scientist, venture capitalist, and essayist. He is known for his work on Lisp, for co-founding Viaweb (later renamed "Yahoo! Store"), and for co-founding the Y Combinator seed capital firm. He is the author of some programming books, such as: On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers & Painters (2004).
In 1996, Graham and Robert Morris founded Viaweb, the first application service provider (ASP). Viaweb's software, originally written mostly in Common Lisp, allowed users to make their own Internet stores. In the summer of 1998 Viaweb was sold to Yahoo! for 455,000 shares of Yahoo! stock, valued at $49.6 million. At Yahoo! the product became Yahoo! Store.
He later gained fame for his essays on his popular website paulgraham.com. Essay subjects range from "Beating the Averages", which compares Lisp to other programming languages and introduced the hypothetical programming language Blub, to "Why Nerds are Unpopular", a discussion of nerd life in high school. A collection of his essays has been published as Hackers & Painters by O'Reilly, which includes a discussion of the growth of Viaweb and what Graham perceives to be the advantages of Lisp to program it.
In 2001, Graham announced that he was working on a new dialect of Lisp named Arc. Over the years since, he has written several essays describing features or goals of the language, and some internal projects at Y Combinator have been written in Arc, most notably the Hacker News web forum and news aggregator program.
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