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Programming Bottom-Up

1993 (This essay is from the introduction to On Lisp.) It's a long-standing principle of programming style that the…

Chapter 2 of Ansi Common Lisp

Chapter 1 of Ansi Common Lisp

Lisp for Web-Based Applications

Beating the Averages

April 2003(This article is derived from a talk given at the 2001 Franz Developer Symposium.) In the summer of 1995, my…

Java's Cover

Being Popular

Five Questions about Language Design

May 2001 (These are some notes I made for a panel discussion on programming language design at MIT on May 10, 2001.)1.…

The Roots of Lisp

May 2001 (I wrote this article to help myself understand exactly what McCarthy discovered. You don't need to know this…

The Other Road Ahead

What Made Lisp Different

May 2002) (This article came about in response to some questions on the LL1 mailing list. It is now incorporated in…

Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented

There is a kind of mania for object-oriented programming at the moment, but some of the smartest programmers I know…

Taste for Makers

What Languages Fix

Kevin Kelleher suggested an interesting way to compare programming languages: to describe each in terms of the problem…

Succinctness is Power

Revenge of the Nerds

We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."- Guy Steele, co-author of the Java spec In the software…

A Plan for Spam

August 2002(This article describes the spam-filtering techniques used in the spamproof web-based mail reader we built…

Design and Research

Better Bayesian Filtering

Why Nerds are Unpopular

The Hundred-Year Language

If Lisp is So Great

Hackers and Painters

Filters that Fight Back

What You Can't Say

The Word "Hacker"

How to Make Wealth

Mind the Gap

Great Hackers

The Python Paradox

The Age of the Essay

What the Bubble Got Right

A Version 1.0

Bradley's Ghost

It's Charisma, Stupid

Made in USA

What You'll Wish You'd Known

How to Start a Startup

March 2005(This essay is derived from a talk at the Harvard Computer Society.)You need three things to create a…

A Unified Theory of VC Suckage

Undergraduation

March 2005(Parts of this essay began as replies to students who wrote to me with questions.)Recently I've had several…

Writing, Briefly

Return of the Mac

Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas

April 2005This summer, as an experiment, some friends and I are giving seed funding to a bunch of new startups. It's…

The Submarine

Hiring is Obsolete

What Business Can Learn from Open Source

After the Ladder

Inequality and Risk

What I Did this Summer