Abstract:

I always assumed gradual types were to help those poor schmucks using untyped languages to migrate to typed languages. I now realise that I am one of the poor schmucks. Much interest within the programming language community now centres on systems such as session types, effect types, and dependent types, which are not currently available in any widely-used language. To support migration from legacy code to code with these exotic type systems, some form of gradual typing appears essential.

(Adapted from A Complement to Blame, Philip Wadler, SNAPL 2015.)

Biography:

Philip Wadler is Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh and Senior Research Fellow at IOHK. He is an ACM Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, past chair of ACM SIGPLAN, past holder of a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Fellowship, and winner of the SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award and the POPL Most Influential Paper Award. Previously, he worked or studied at Stanford, Xerox Parc, CMU, Oxford, Chalmers, Glasgow, Bell Labs, and Avaya Labs, and visited as a guest professor in Copenhagen, Sydney, and Paris. He has an h-index of 70 with more than 25,000 citations to his work, according to Google Scholar. He contributed to the designs of Haskell, Java, and XQuery, and is a co-author of Introduction to Functional Programming (Prentice Hall, 1988), XQuery from the Experts (Addison Wesley, 2004), Generics and Collections in Java (O’Reilly, 2006), and Programming Language Foundations in Agda (2018). He has delivered invited talks in locations ranging from Aizu to Zurich.