Paul Graham
Yahoo!
Paul Graham
Paul GrahamPaul Graham (b.
1964) is a Lisp programmer and essayist. He is the author
of On Lisp (1993),
ANSI Common Lisp (1995),
and Hackers & Painters (2004).
In 1995 Graham and Robert Morris founded Viaweb, the first Application
service provider. Viaweb's software (written largely in Common
Lisp) let users 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.
[1] At Yahoo! the product became Yahoo! Store.
He has since begun writing essays for his popular website paulgraham.com.
They range from "Beating the Averages", which compares Lisp to other programming
languages, to "Why
Nerds are Unpopular", a discussion of nerd life in high school. A collection
of his essays has been published as
Hackers and Painters (ISBN
0596006624) by
O'Reilly.
He is also working on
Arc, a new Lisp dialect. It is discussed in his essay The Hundred-Year Language,
among others. As part of his work on Arc, he began developing an email client
and decided it needed a good spam filter. The simplified naive Bayes classifier he described in "A
Plan for Spam" inspired the current generation of probabilistic spam
filters.
In 2005, after giving a talk at the Harvard Computer Society later published as
How to Start a Startup, Graham along with
Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston and Robert Morris started Y Combinator to
provide seed funding to startups, particularly those started by younger, more
technically-oriented founders. Among the teams accepted into the first year's
program was one including Aaron Swartz, a Stanford University student and noted teenage programmer.
Graham has an
A.B. from Cornell and a Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard, and studied
painting at Rhode Island School of Design and the Accademia di Belle Arti in
Florence.
External links
By Paul Graham
About Paul Graham
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