History of T

Paul Graham is a well-known programmer, essayist, and co-founder of the startup accelerator Y Combinator. In the 1990s, he co-created a programming language called Arc, and before that, he worked on an earlier language called T. - T was a dialect of Lisp (a family of programming languages known for flexible syntax and powerful macros) developed at Yale in the 1980s by Graham, Robert Morris, and others. It was designed to be a "Scheme" (a minimalist Lisp dialect) that could run as efficiently as mainstream languages like C, which was a novel goal at the time. - The project was notable for its technical innovations (e.g., incremental compilation, fast type checking) but ultimately failed to gain wide adoption. This essay is a retrospective account of why — covering academic politics, design trade-offs, and the challenges of making a niche language succeed. - Why it matters: This is a classic postmortem of a software project by a prominent tech thinker. It offers insights into why technically superior systems sometimes fail, and it provides historical context for the later success of Y Combinator and the broader startup culture Graham helped shape.