Philip Lee Wadler was born on April 8, 1956. He is a UK-based American computer scientist known for his work in 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. He also helped design 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 the author of "Theorems for free!", a paper that inspired much research on functional language optimization (see also Parametricity).
Education
Wadler earned a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from Stanford University in 1977. He received a Master of Science degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979. In 1984, he completed a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. His doctoral thesis was titled "Listlessness is better than laziness" and was supervised by Nico Habermann.
Research and career
Philip Wadler's research interests include programming languages.
From 1983 to 1987, he worked as a research fellow at the Programming Research Group, which is part of the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, and also at St Cross College, Oxford. From 1987 to 1996, he held positions as lecturer, reader, and professor at the University of Glasgow. Between 1996 and 1999, he was a member of technical staff at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies. From 1999 to 2003, he worked at Avaya Labs. Since 2003, he has been a professor of theoretical computer science at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.
From 1990 to 2004, Wadler was the editor of the Journal of Functional Programming.
Since 2003, he has also worked at the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, where he serves as chair of theoretical computer science. In 2006, he helped develop a new functional programming language called Links for creating web applications. He has guided many students to complete their doctoral degrees. He is also part of the University of Edinburgh's Blockchain Technology Laboratory. His work has been cited 26,864 times, and his h-index is 72.
From 2018 to the present, Wadler has been a senior research fellow and area leader for programming languages at IOHK (now Input Output Global), a company that develops the Cardano blockchain. He has worked on Plutus, a smart contract language for Cardano written in Haskell; the UTXO ledger system; native tokens; and System F in Agda.
In 2003, Wadler received an award for the most influential paper from ten years earlier. The paper, titled "Imperative Functional Programming," was co-written with Simon Peyton Jones in 1993. In 2005, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE). In 2007, he became a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2023, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).