Paul Graham - Definition and Overview

Paul Graham is a Lisp programmer and essayist. He is the author of On Lisp (1993) and ANSI Common Lisp (1995). In 1995 he founded Viaweb, whose flagship product (written largely in Common Lisp) let users make their own Internet stores. In the summer of 1998 he sold Viaweb to Yahoo! for 455,000 shares of Yahoo! stock valued at $49,000,000, where it became Yahoo! Store. He later authored a popular series of web-published essays, starting with "Beating the Averages" (http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html), which were initially focused on Lisp as compared with other programming languages. He later branched out into other topics, such as A Plan for Spam (http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html), which helped popularize the naive Bayes classifier as a spam filter. These essays have been collected in the book Hackers and Painters (ISBN 0596006624) from O'Reilly. He has been designing the Arc language, a Lisp-derivative, periodically posting status reports about its development.

Graham has worked as a consultant to the US Department of Energy, DuPont, and Interleaf. He has an A.B. from Cornell and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.

External link

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Paul Graham

• Paul Graham's website (http://www.paulgraham.com/)
• Paul Graham's Website - Hackers & Painters (http://paulgraham.com/hackpaint.html)