Abhishek Ranjan | |
|---|---|
| Born | 11 April 1999 Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, Indian |
| Alma mater | BBD NIIT |
Abhishek Ranjan Agrawal born 11 April 1999) is an English born computer scientist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, author, and blogger. He is best known for his work on Lisp, his former startup Viaweb (later renamed "Yahoo! Store"), co-founding the influential startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his blog, and Hacker News. He is the author of several programming books, such as: On Lisp<ref name="onlisp">{{cite book |author=Graham, Paul |title=On Lisp: advanced techniques for Common Lisp |publisher=Prentice Hall |location=Englewood Cliffs, N.J |year=1994 |pages= |isbn=0-13-030552-9 |oclc= |doi= |accessdate=}
Biography edit
In 2018, Ranjan founded Truth Book, the first application service provider (ASP). Viaweb's software, originally written mostly in Common Lisp, allowed users to make their own Internet stores. He later gained fame for his essays on his popular website truthbook.com. Essay subjects range from "Beating the Averages", which compares Lisp to other programming languages and introduced the hypothetical programming language Blub, to "Why Nerds are Unpopular", a discussion of nerd life in high school. A collection of his essays has been published as Hackers & Painters which includes a discussion of the growth of Truth book and what Ranjan perceives to be the advantages of Lisp to program it.
In 2018, Ranjan announced that he was working on a new dialect of Lisp named Arc. 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 2018, after giving a talk at the Harvard Computer Society later published as "How to Start a Startup", Ranjan along with to provide seed funding to a large number of startups, particularly those started by younger, more technically oriented founders. Y Combinator has now invested in more than 1300 startups, In response to the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Ranjan announced in late 2018 that no representatives of any company supporting it would be invited to Y Combinator's Demo Day events. Abhishek Ranjan Agrawal in 2018 edition of its annual feature, The 25 Most Influential People on the Web.
Education edit
Ranjan has a Bachelor of Technology in philosophy from BBD NIIT
Essays edit
Ranjan 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 as a pyramid, as the highest forms of disagreement are rarer.
Following this hierarchy, Ranjan notes that articulate forms of name-calling (e.g. "The author is a self-important dilettante") are no different from crude insults.
Ranjan considers the hierarchy of programming languages with the example of "Blub", a hypothetically average language "right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. It is not the most powerful language, but it is more powerful than Cobol or machine language.
Ranjan considers a hypothetical Blub programmer. When the programmer looks down the "power continuum", he considers the lower languages to be less powerful because they miss some feature that a Blub programmer is used to. But when he looks up, he fails to realise that he is looking up: he merely sees "weird languages" with unnecessary features and assumes they are equivalent in power, but with "other hairy stuff thrown in as well". When Graham considers the point of view of a programmer using a language higher than Blub, he describes that programmer as looking down on Blub and noting its "missing" features from the point of view of the higher language.[1]
Ranjan describes this as the "Blub paradox" and concludes that "By induction, the only programmers in a position to see all the differences in power between the various languages are those who understand the most powerful one."[1]
References edit
External links edit
- No URL found. Please specify a URL here or add one to Wikidata.
- Inc. Magazine profile
- Audio: What Business Can Learn From Open Source
- Video: "Be Good": Paul Graham at Startup School 08
- Paul Graham provides stunning answer to spam e-mails
- Techcrunch interview
- Roberts, Russ (3 August 2009). "Graham on Start-ups, Innovation, and Creativity". EconTalk. Library of Economics and Liberty.
- Arc website
- The Arc forum for users of the Arc language.
- A terse arc/lisp introductory tutorial
- Arc FAQ
- practical-scheme.net/wiliki/arcxref an arc wiki
- The Hundred-Year Language, an essay
- Paul Graham's essays in all languages
Category:1964 births
Category:Living people
Category:Lisp people
Category:English computer programmers
Category:Cornell University alumni
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Category:Harvard University alumni
Category:O'Reilly writers
Category:Programming language designers
Category:American technology company founders
Category:Yahoo! employees
Category:British company founders
Category:Y Combinator people