Paul Graham
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Paul Graham (b. Weymouth, England, 1964) is a Lisp programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist. He is the author of On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers & Painters (2004).
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[edit] Biography
In 1995 Graham and Robert Morris founded Viaweb, an early Web application. Viaweb's software, originally written in a mix of Common Lisp, C, and Perl[1], 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. [2] At Yahoo! the product became Yahoo! Store and was later rewritten in a mixture of C++ and Perl.
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 and introduced the word Blub, 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 0-596-00662-4) by O'Reilly.
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. Y Combinator has now invested in 58 startups, including reddit, Justin.tv and loopt.
Graham has a B.A. [2] from Cornell. He earned an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Applied Sciences, (specializing in computer science) from Harvard in 1988 and 1990 respectively [3], and studied painting at Rhode Island School of Design and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.
[edit] Arc Programming Language
In 2001, Paul 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.
However, as of November 2007, no formal specification has been published and no public implementation of the language has been released. Paul Graham's Arc page recommends that those who want to know when it will be released should join a mailing list, but doesn't give any release date estimates, saying "We reserve the right to take a very long time. It's been almost 50 years since McCarthy first described Lisp. Another 2 or 3 aren't going to kill anyone."[3]
In the essay Being Popular Graham describes a few of his goals for the language. While many of the goals are very general ("Arc should be hackable," "there should be good libraries"), he did give some specifics. For instance, he believes that it is important for a language to be terse, favoring symbols and operators over keywords, in an effort to reduce the length of the program in terms of characters of source code:
It would not be far from the truth to say that a hacker about to write a program decides what language to use, at least subconsciously, based on the total number of characters he'll have to type. If this isn't precisely how hackers think, a language designer would do well to act as if it were.
He also stated that it is better for a language to only implement a small number of "axioms," even when that means the language won't have large organizational features, such as Object orientation, that many programmers want. In fact, Graham feels that Object Orientation is not useful as OO methods and patterns are just "good design," and he sees the language features used to implement OO as partially mistaken. [4][5].
A controversy among LISP programmers is if, and the extent to which, the S-expressions of the language should be complemented by other forms of syntax. Graham feels that additional syntax should be used in situations where pure S-expressions would be overly verbose, "I don't think we should be religiously opposed to introducing syntax into lisp." Graham also feels that efficiency problems should be solved by giving the programmer a good Profiler.
[edit] Bayesian Filtering
In 2002, Graham published a an essay entitled "A Plan for Spam," in which he advocated using a Naive Bayes classifier to identify spam. While Graham did not discover Bayesian spam filtering,[6] his paper directly lead to the creation of the popular bogofilter software, which uses the method, and the inclusion of Bayesian Filtering in other existing products such as spamassassin.
Since "A Plan for Spam" Bayesian Filtering has come to be regarded as the best method for filtering spam in situations where the filter can be trained, beating older heuristic approaches both in terms of the simplicity of the process and the quality of the classification.[7]
[edit] External links
[edit] By Paul Graham
- Paul Graham's website
- Paul Graham's essays
- Audio: Great Hackers
- Audio: What Business Can Learn From Open Source
- Video: Power of the Marginal: RailsConf 2006 Keynote Address
[edit] Arc-Related
[edit] About Paul Graham
- "Paul Graham Nails It"
- Paul Graham provides stunning answer to spam e-mails
- Techcrunch interview
- Paul Graham on YCombinator video
[edit] Parodies
[edit] References
- ^ Paul Graham. Beating the Averages. Retrieved on 2007-10-28.
- ^ "I might not be the best source of advice, because I was a philosophy major in college. "[1]
- ^ Paul Graham. Arc. Retrieved on 2007-11-06.
- ^ Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented
- ^ Arc FAQ
- ^ M. Sahami, S. Dumais, D. Heckerman, E. Horvitz (1998). A Bayesian approach to filtering junk e-mail. AAAI'98 Workshop on Learning for Text Categorization.
- ^ Why Bayesian filtering is the most effective anti-spam technology. GFI. Retrieved on 2007-11-09.
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