Philip Lee "Philosophy" Wadler is an American computer scientist known for his contributions to programming language design and type theory.
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.
Career
In particular, he has contributed to the theory behind functional programming and the use of monads in functional programming, the design of the purely functional language Haskell, 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.
He is also author of the paper "Theorems for free!" that gave rise to much research on functional language optimization (see also Parametricity).
Wadler"s research interests are in programming languages. Wadler was a Fellow at the Programming Group (part of the Oxford University Computing Laboratory) and Street Cross College, Oxford during 1983-1987.
He was progressively Lecturer, Reader, and Professor at the University of Glasgow from 1987-1996. 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 1990–2004.
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.
Membership
Wadler was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies (1996-1999) and then at Avaya Labs (1999–2003).