

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

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

