Paul Graham (/ɡræm/; born November 13, 1964)[3] is an English-American computer scientist, writer and essayist, entrepreneur and investor.

Store), co-founding the startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, a number of essays and books, and the media webpage Hacker News.

[9][12] Graham has also studied fine arts and painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.

In the summer of 1998, after Jerry Yang received a strong recommendation from Ali Partovi,[15] Viaweb was sold to Yahoo!

A collection of his essays has been published as Hackers & Painters[6] by O'Reilly Media, which includes a discussion of the growth of Viaweb and the advantages of Lisp to program it.

[20] BusinessWeek included Paul Graham in the 2008 edition of its annual feature, The 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

[21] 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.

Following 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.

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".

But when they look up, they fail to realize that they are looking up: they merely see "weird languages" with unnecessary features and assumes they are equivalent in power, but with "other hairy stuff thrown in as well".