

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". These studies would like to formally prove that a certain language is more or less expressive than another language.

It is not the most powerful language, but it is more powerful than Cobol or machine language." It was used by Graham to illustrate a comparison, beyond Turing 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. Graham considers the hierarchy of programming languages with the example of Blub, a hypothetically average language "right in the middle of the abstractness continuum.
DRCHRONO LIGHTTABLE HOW TO
Graham proposed a disagreement hierarchy in a 2008 essay How to Disagree, putting types of argument 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.įollowing 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. Graham writes and self-publishes essays on his website, some examples include:

In October 2019, Graham announced a specification for another new dialect of Lisp, written in itself, named Bel.

In February 2014, Graham stepped down from his day-to-day role at Y Combinator. In response to the proposed Stop 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. Y Combinator has now invested in more than 1300 startups, including Reddit,, Xobni, Dropbox, Airbnb and Stripe.īusinessWeek included Paul Graham in 2008 edition of its annual feature, The 25 Most Influential People on the Web. 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 a large number of startups, particularly those started by younger, more technically oriented founders. 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. In 2001, Graham announced that he was working on a new dialect of Lisp named Arc. A collection of his essays has been published as Hackers & Painters by O'Reilly Media, which includes a discussion of the growth of Viaweb and what Graham perceives to be the advantages of Lisp to program it. Essay subjects range from Beating the Averages, which compares Lisp to other programming languages and introduced the hypothetical programming language The Blub paradox, to Why Nerds are Unpopular, a discussion of nerd life in high school. Graham later gained notice for his essays, which he posts to his personal website. After the acquisition, the product became Yahoo! Store. In the summer of 1998, after Jerry Yang received a strong recommendation from Ali Partovi, Viaweb was sold to Yahoo! for 455,000 shares of Yahoo! stock, valued at $49.6 million. Viaweb's software, written mostly in Common Lisp, allowed users to make their own Internet stores. Viaweb was the first application service provider (ASP) according to Graham. In 1996, Graham and Robert Morris founded Viaweb and recruited Trevor Blackwell shortly after. He has also studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. He then attended Harvard University, earning Master of Science (1988) and Doctor of Philosophy (1990) degrees in computer science. Graham received a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Cornell University (1986). Graham gained interest in science and mathematics from his father who was a nuclear physicist. Graham and his family moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1968, where he later attended Gateway High School.
