Paul Graham: Biography and Creativity

American essayist, entrepreneur and famous programmer Paul Graham in 2008 was included in the list of 25 most influential people in the web sphere according to the version of the magazine BusinessWeek. His ideas today help thousands of young people.

A few facts from the biography

Paul Graham was born in 1964 in England. Shortly thereafter, his physicist father traveled with his family to the United States, as he was offered a job at a nuclear reactor design enterprise.

Back in school, the boy started writing computer programs aimed at solving practical problems. One of them, for example, was created to simulate the flight trajectory of space rockets.

After completing his studies at the school, Graham entered Cornell University and after his graduation received a bachelor's degree. Later, he was awarded a master's degree and a PhD in computer science at Harvard. The talented young man did not stop there and decided to continue his studies with science in order to create an artificial intelligence. However, he soon realized that he would not be able to realize his dream and was carried away by painting. In order to succeed in this field, he enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, and also graduated from Rhode Island School of Design. He moved to a close studio in New York, dreaming of an artist's career, but he became chronically short of money. This prompted the guy to think once and for all to get rid of problems with finances.

Viaweb

In 1995 Paul Graham and Robert Morris created Viaweb. This software, written in Common Lisp, allowed ordinary users to create their own online stores. In the summer of 1998, Yahoo took Viaweb for 455,000 shares, which at that time cost $ 49.6 million. The product became known as the Yahoo Store.

Paul Graham: books about Lisp

As you know, a talented person is talented in everything. Paul Graham is no exception, which is confirmed by his essays and books.

The most famous of his literary works are On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995) and Hackers & Painters (2004).

The first two books are devoted to Lisp - a programming language, whose active popularizer is Graham. They are designed for professionals, as well as students who are still only learning the subtleties of their profession. In On Lisp, the author concentrates on macros and a number of other specific features of the Lisp language, demonstrating by examples how their use helps to radically change the approach to solving a number of practical problems. As for ANSI Common Lisp, this is the classic Lisp textbook. It is also written for programmers and includes a detailed explanation of the basic concepts of this language, as well as a full description of the ANSI Common Lisp standard.

Hackers & Painters

The third of Paul Graham's famous books was written in 2004. It is a collection of essays, which was published by O'Reilly. They are not related, and they address various issues related to programming: language selection, the correct design of Web applications, the problem of protecting the user from spam, the economic issues associated with the implementation of Internet start-ups, etc.

The "Blab's Paradox"

Links to Paul Graham on thematic resources and in specialized literature can be found quite often. In particular, a great interest in his time was caused by the Blub paradox described by him, which Graham shared with his audience in the essay "Defeating mediocrity". He touches on issues related to the difficulties in promoting more powerful programming languages, above all, Lips. In 2 words, its essence is as follows: there is a programmer who owns and "thinks on Blab" (some kind of rather primitive programming language). He expresses the solution of any problem in the means of Blub. Moreover, the additional funds available in a more powerful language, for him, have no value. And this is not surprising, since he does not know how to use them! Only when the programmer learns a new language because of some external reasons, he will have an opportunity to understand the full limitations of Blab. Thus, the primitiveness of the old "tool" in itself is not an incentive for learning a new one. After all, to realize the limitations of the possibilities of a familiar language, one must already know the more powerful one.

Through this paradox, Paul Graham explains why programmers usually do not seek to learn more effective tools than those already possess.

"Graham's Pyramid"

This name was received by the hierarchy of arguments in the dispute, which Paul cited in the essay "How to object correctly." Those who know her consider the Pyramid extremely useful for everyone who needs to defend their point of view in the dispute.

All possible arguments during the discussion are presented in the form of a seven-level hierarchy. Paul Graham, whose "Whit combinator" (accelerator) is known all over the world, notes that one should strive upwards, to the "top of the pyramid", and then it will be possible to reduce the intensity of the dispute. In practice, a hierarchy is often used by bloggers who evaluate comments using it and choose those that are worthy of answering.

Paul Graham: "The Combinator"

In 2005, the famous essayist made a speech in the Harvard Computer Society. Some time later it was published as a rather lengthy essay under the heading "How to Start a Startup." Meeting with colleagues, most of whom were very young boys and girls, pushed Graham to create, along with like-minded Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris of Y Combinator. The goal of the project was to provide start-ups, especially those created by very young people and aimed at developing new technologies in the IT field, with the necessary monetary sums at the very beginning of their journey.

One of the successful projects of Y Combinator was the creation of the site Hacker News. In addition, its successful "graduates" are Dropbox, Airbnb rental service, Stripe company, etc. The accelerator has already released more than 7 hundred startups. At the same time, the total valuation of all companies exceeds $ 30 billion.

"10 rules"

Paul Graham, a film worth seeing for anyone who wants to start a business on the Web, recommends:

• Start small;
• Look for markets where there are many competitors;
• To be engaged in programming, and not to waste time on an MBA;
• Do not seek to cover many users at once;
• Dismiss any employee who does not benefit;
• Underestimate yourself;
• Hiring the minimum number of employees;
• Do not be guided by the amount that you can get for a startup;
• Work on ideas that few people consider successful;
• Understand that to achieve success it will take at least 3-4 years.

Now you know who Paul Graham is. "White combinator" (the film about this project, still to be removed) - is one of the most successful children of this talented person. His ideas inspire young people, and the councils help to achieve a great success even for those who do not have a lot of starting capital.