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

Re:Ask PG: What was the topic of your Ph.D. dissertation? by pg on Friday May 01, 2009 @01:19PM (#588783)

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.

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Re:Ask PG: What was the topic of your Ph.D. dissertation? by cperciva on Friday May 01, 2009 @01:37PM (#588822)

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.

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Re:Ask PG: What was the topic of your Ph.D. dissertation? by rdr on Friday May 01, 2009 @05:56PM (#589221)

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.

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Re:Ask PG: What was the topic of your Ph.D. dissertation? by benreesman on Friday May 01, 2009 @03:27PM (#588983)

I'd like to read it if you don't mind and still have a copy lying around.

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Re:Ask PG: What was the topic of your Ph.D. dissertation? by suranap on Friday May 01, 2009 @04:14PM (#589062)

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.

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Re:Ask PG: What was the topic of your Ph.D. dissertation? by rdr on Friday May 01, 2009 @05:54PM (#589220)

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.

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