Philip Wadler

Phil Wadler

Philip Wadler before a lecture at the University of Edinburgh.
Born Philip Lee Wadler
April 8, 1956
Fields Programming languages[1]
Institutions
Alma mater
Thesis Listlessness is Better than Laziness: An Algorithm that Transforms Applicative Programs to Eliminate Intermediate Lists (1984)
Doctoral advisor Nico Habermann[2]
Doctoral students
  • Ezra Cooper[2]
  • Kei Davis[2]
  • DeLesley Hutchins[3]
  • David Lester[4]
  • Simon Marlow[5]
  • Philip Trinder[6]
  • Jeremy Yallop[7]
Notable awards
Website
homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler
wadler.blogspot.com

Philip Lee "Phil" Wadler (born April 8, 1956) is an American computer scientist known for his contributions to programming language design and type theory. In particular, he has contributed to the theory behind functional programming[8] and the use of monads in functional programming, the design of the purely functional language Haskell,[9] and the XQuery declarative query language. In 1984, he created the Orwell programming language. Wadler was involved in adding generic types to Java 5.0.[10] He is also author of the paper "Theorems for free!"[11] that gave rise to much research on functional language optimization (see also Parametricity).

Education

Wadler received a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from Stanford University in 1977, and a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979.[12] He completed his Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in 1984. His thesis was entitled "Listlessness is Better than Laziness" and was supervised by Nico Habermann.[2]

Research

Wadler's research interests[13][1][14] are in programming languages.[10][15]

Wadler was a Research Fellow at the Programming Research Group (part of the Oxford University Computing Laboratory) and St Cross College, Oxford during 1983–87.[12] He was progressively Lecturer, Reader, and Professor at the University of Glasgow from 1987–96. Wadler was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies (1996–99) and then at Avaya Labs (1999–2003). Since 2003, he has been Professor of Theoretical Computer Science in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.[16]

Academic service

Wadler was editor of the Journal of Functional Programming from 1990–2004. He received the Most Influential POPL Paper Award in 2003 for the 1993 POPL Symposium paper Imperative Functional Programming, jointly with Simon Peyton Jones.[12][17] In 2005, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2007, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Wadler is currently working on a new functional language designed for writing web applications, called Links.[18]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Philip Wadler's publications indexed by Google Scholar, a free service provided by Google
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Philip Wadler at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ↑ Hutchins, DeLesley (2009). Pure subtype systems: a type theory for extensible software (PhD thesis). University of Edinburgh.
  4. ↑ Lester, David R. (1988). Combinator graph reduction : A congruence and its applications (DPhil thesis). University of Oxford.
  5. ↑ Marlow, Simon David (1996). Deforestation for higher-order functional programs (PhD thesis). University of Glasgow.
  6. ↑ Trinder, Phil (1989). A functional database (DPhil thesis). University of Oxford.
  7. ↑ Yallop, Jeremy (2010). Abstraction for web programming (PhD thesis). University of Edinburgh.
  8. ↑ http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/2440 Philip Wadler: Biography at O'Reilly Media.
  9. ↑ Hudak, P.; Johnsson, T.; Kieburtz, D.; Nikhil, R.; Partain, W.; Peterson, J.; Peyton Jones, S.; Wadler, P.; Boutel, B.; Fairbairn, J.; Fasel, J.; Guzmán, M. A. M.; Hammond, K.; Hughes, J. (1992). "Report on the programming language Haskell". ACM SIGPLAN Notices 27 (5): 1. doi:10.1145/130697.130699.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Wadler, Philip; Naftalin, Maurice (2007). Java generics and collections. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly. ISBN 0-596-52775-6.
  11. ↑ Wadler, P. (1989). "Theorems for free!". Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Functional programming languages and computer architecture - FPCA '89. p. 347. doi:10.1145/99370.99404. ISBN 0897913280.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 Philip Wadler vita.
  13. ↑ Philip Wadler's publications indexed by the DBLP Bibliography Server at the University of Trier
  14. ↑ Philip Wadler's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database, a service provided by Elsevier.
  15. ↑ Bird, Richard Miller; Wadler, Philip (1998). Introduction to functional programming using Haskell. New York: Prentice Hall Europe. ISBN 0-13-484346-0.
  16. ↑ Philip Wadler, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK.
  17. ↑ Peyton Jones, S. L.; Wadler, P. (1993). "Imperative functional programming". Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages - POPL '93. p. 71. doi:10.1145/158511.158524. ISBN 0897915607.
  18. ↑ Links programming language group, University of Edinburgh, UK.

External links