Paul Graham | |
|---|---|
 Graham in 2011 | |
| Born | (1964-11-13)November 13, 1964 (age 61)[1] Weymouth, Dorset, England |
| Citizenship |
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| Education | Cornell University (BA) Harvard University (MS,PhD) |
| Known for | Viaweb Y Combinator Hacker News Hackers & Painters |
| Spouse | |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Thesis | The State of a Program and Its Uses (1990) |
| Website | paulgraham |
Paul Graham (/ɡræm/; born November 13, 1964)[2] is an English-American computer scientist, writer, essayist, entrepreneur and investor. His work includes the programming languageArc, the startupViaweb (later renamedYahoo! Store), co-founding thestartup accelerator and seed capital firmY Combinator, a number of essays and books, and the media webpageHacker News.
He is the author of the computer programming booksOn Lisp,[3]ANSI Common Lisp,[4] andHackers & Painters.[5] Technology journalistSteven Levy has described Graham as a "hacker philosopher".[6]
Graham was born in England, where he and his family have maintained a permanent residence since 2016. He is also a citizen of the United States, where he attended all of his schooling and lived for 48 years prior to returning to England.
Graham was born inWeymouth, Dorset, England.[7] His father was fromPwllheli, Wales, and worked forWestinghouse (nowCBS Corporation) designingnuclear reactors.[8] Graham and his family moved toPittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1968, where he later attended theGateway High School. He began writingcomputer code in high school.[9]
Graham received aBachelor of Arts with a major inphilosophy fromCornell University in 1986.[10][11][12] He then received aMaster of Science in 1988, and aDoctor of Philosophy in 1990, both incomputer science fromHarvard University.[10][13]
Graham also studied fine arts and painting at theRhode Island School of Design and at theAccademia di Belle Arti inFlorence.[10][13]
In 1996, Graham andRobert Morris foundedViaweb and recruitedTrevor Blackwell shortly after. They believed that Viaweb was the firstapplication service provider.[14] Graham received a patent for webapps based on his work at Viaweb.[15] Viaweb's software, written mostly inCommon Lisp, allowed users to make their ownInternet stores. In the summer of 1998, afterJerry Yang received a strong recommendation fromAli Partovi,[16] Viaweb was sold toYahoo! for 455,000 shares of Yahoo! stock, valued at $49.6 million.[17][18] After the acquisition, the product becameYahoo! Store.
Graham later gained notice for his essays, which he posts on his personal website. Essay subjects range from "Beating the Averages",[19] which compares Lisp to otherprogramming languages and introduced the hypothetical programming languageBlub, to "Why Nerds are Unpopular",[20] a discussion ofnerd life in high school. A collection of his essays has been published asHackers & Painters[5] byO'Reilly Media, which includes a discussion of the growth of Viaweb and the advantages of Lisp to program it.
In 2001, Graham announced that he was working on a newdialect of Lisp namedArc. It was released on 29 January 2008.[21] 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, including the Hacker News web forum and news aggregator program.
In 2005, after giving a talk at the Harvard Computer Society later published as "How to Start a Startup", Graham along withTrevor Blackwell,Jessica Livingston, andRobert Morris startedY Combinator to provideseed funding tostartups, particularly those started by younger, more technically oriented founders. Y Combinator has invested in more than 1300 startups, includingReddit,Twitch (formerlyJustin.tv),Xobni,Dropbox,Airbnb, andStripe.[22]
BusinessWeek included Paul Graham in the 2008 edition of its annual feature,The 25 Most Influential People on the Web.[23]
In response to the proposedStop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Graham announced in late 2011 that no representatives of any company supporting it would be invited to Y Combinator's Demo Day events.[24]
In February 2014, Graham stepped down from his day-to-day role at Y Combinator.[25]
In October 2019, Graham announced aspecification for another new dialect of Lisp, written in itself, named Bel.[26]
Graham proposed a disagreement hierarchy in a 2008 essay "How to Disagree",[27] putting types ofargument into a seven-point hierarchy and observing that "If moving up the disagreement hierarchy makes people less mean, that will make most of them happier." Graham also suggested that the hierarchy can be thought of as a pyramid, as the highest forms of disagreement are rarer.
Following this hierarchy, Graham notes that articulate forms of name-calling (e.g., "The author is a self-important dilettante") are no different from crude insults. When in disagreement people often become more animated and engaged, and this leads to them becoming angry.[28] At the lower levels, the attacks are directed against the person, which can be hateful. Higher levels of argument are directed against the idea, which is easier to recognize and accept.[29] When people argue at the higher levels, the exchange of viewpoint is more informative and helpful.[30]
Graham considers the hierarchy ofprogramming languages with the example ofBlub, a hypothetically average language "right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. It is not the most powerful language, but it is more powerful thanCobol ormachine language."[31] It was used by Graham to illustrate a comparison, beyondTuring completeness, of programming language power, and more specifically to illustrate the difficulty of comparing a programming language one knows to one that one does not.
...These studies would like to formally prove that a certain language is more or less expressive than another language. Determining such a relation between languages objectively rather than subjectively seems to be somewhat problematic, a phenomenon that Paul Graham has discussed in "The Blub Paradox".[32][33]
Graham considers a hypothetical Blub programmer. When the programmer looks down the "power continuum", they consider thelower languages to be less powerful because they miss some feature that a Blub programmer is used to. But when they look up, they fail to realize that they are looking up: they merely see "weird languages" with unnecessary features and assumes they are equivalent in power, but with "other hairy stuff thrown in as well". When Graham considers the point of view of a programmer using a language higher than Blub, he describes that programmer as looking down on Blub and noting its "missing" features from the point of view of the higher language.[32]
Graham describes this asthe Blub paradox and concludes that "By induction, the only programmers in a position to see all the differences in power between the various languages are those who understand the most powerful one."[32]
The concept has been cited by programmers such asJoel Spolsky.[34]
In 2008, Graham marriedJessica Livingston.[35][36][37] They have two children, and have been living in England since 2016.[38][39]
(Paul Graham, b. Nov. 13, 1964)
Jessica Livingston and I (who are married despite our different last names) are expecting our first child any day now.
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