Philip Wadler

Philip Lee Wadler (born April 8, 1956) 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 (see also Parametricity).