Speaking with IT Conversations host Doug Kaye, Paul explains some of issues explored in his new book including Why Nerds Are Unpopular--Paul gets email from all over the world about this essay--and Good Bad Attitude--Is there such a thing as a hacker ethic?
In 1995, working with Robert Morris, Paul built what was arguably the first major web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998 and became Yahoo Stores. Regarding the stressfullness of those days, Paul wrote, "I remember sitting back in the dentist's chair, waiting for the drill, and feeling like I was on vacation."
And you won't want to miss Paul's comments on Java, which he says, like Cobol ("a Neanderthal language"), is an evolutionary dead end.
Paul Graham is currently working on a new programming language called Arc. In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998. In 2002 he described a simple but effective Bayesian spam filter that inspired most current filters.
Paul is the author of On Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1993), ANSI Common Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1995), and Hackers & Painters (O'Reilly, 2004). 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.
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