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Ask PG: What was the topic of your Ph.D. dissertation?

18 points by rdr ↗ HN
I'm a big fan of your technical essays, so I recently became curious about what you did your Ph.D. on, but a quick Google search didn't turn up anything helpful.

(sorry if this question has been answered before, i'm new to this site)

6 comments

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pg
Continuations. It was actually completely wrong. I "proved" that you didn't want continuations in a programming language, because there were only a few possible uses of them, and they could all be more cheaply implemented using special-purpose operators. The good bits got re-used in On Lisp. The rest was crap.

What I should have written about was macro hacking and embedded languages and so on. That was what I really studied in grad school. But it didn't seem theoretical enough to be a thesis topic.

cperciva
What I should have written about was macro hacking and embedded languages and so on. That was what I really studied in grad school.

I doubt you were the first person to write a thesis which was unrelated to what you spent most of your time studying, and I know you weren't the last. I spent two years researching parallel computing, and then ended up throwing a thesis together out of two months of work on string matching and delta compression.

rdr
agreed, oftentimes hacking on a problem for a long time enables you to discover another more interesting (or practical) problem whose need wouldn't have arisen if you weren't working on your original problem in the first place.
benreesman
I'd like to read it if you don't mind and still have a copy lying around.
suranap
I did write a thesis on macro hacking and embedded languages, and it wasn't theoretical enough to be useful. The stuff I had for the compiler's phase ordering problem was done better by other people.
rdr
cool, thanks for the quick reply. i was also gonna ask whether parts of your thesis were available online in the forms of research papers or PDF dissertation, but i guess i can read the free On Lisp PDF.