Paul Graham

Paul Graham is a Lisp programmer. He is the author of On Lisp (1993) and ANSI Common Lisp (1995), now the standard college text. 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!, where it became Yahoo! Store. He is now designing the Arc language, a Lisp-derivative for expert programmers, and writing essays, which have been collected in the book Hackers and Painters from O'Reilly.

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

He is also the author of the essay Why Nerds are Unpopular, and , which helped popularize naive Bayesian classification as a spam filter.