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Ask PG: What was the topic of your Ph.D. dissertation?
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)
- pg 17y agoContinuations. 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 17y agoWhat 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 17y agoagreed, 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 17y agoI'd like to read it if you don't mind and still have a copy lying around.
- suranap 17y agoI 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 17y agocool, 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.