Philip Wadler
Philip Lee Wadler is a UK-based American computer scientist known for his contributions to programming language design and type theory. He holds the position of Personal Chair of theoretical computer science at the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He has contributed to the theory behind functional programming and the use of monads; and the designs of the purely functional language Haskell and the XQuery declarative query language. In 1984, he created the Orwell language. Wadler was involved in adding generic types to Java 5.0. He is also author of "Theorems for free!", a paper that gave rise to much research on functional language optimization.
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. 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.Research and career
Wadler's research interests are in programming languages.Wadler was a research fellow at the Programming Research Group and St Cross College, Oxford during 1983–87. He was progressively lecturer, reader, and professor at the University of Glasgow from 1987 to 1996. Wadler was a member of technical staff at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies and then at Avaya Labs. Since 2003, he has been professor of theoretical computer science in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.
Wadler was editor of the Journal of Functional Programming from 1990 to 2004.
Since 2003, Wadler has been a professor of theoretical computer science at the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh and is the chair of theoretical computer science. In 2006, he was working on a new functional language for writing web applications, called Links. He has supervised many doctoral students to completion. He is also a member of the university's Blockchain Technology Laboratory. Wadler has a h-index of 72 with 26,864 citations at Google Scholar.
Since 2018 Wadler has also been a senior research fellow and area leader for programming languages at IOHK, the blockchain engineering company developing Cardano. He has contributed to work on Plutus, a Turing-complete smart contract language for Cardano written in Haskell; the UTXO ledger system, native tokens, and System F in Agda.