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Interested in working on compilers, languages, virtual machines, distributed & Web programming, security, and all the fun stuff? Drop me a note!

Background

Before joining Microsoft, I was an associate professor at Utrecht University where I worked on advanced scripting languages such as Haskell, XMLambda, and Mondrian and directed the Microsoft lab (now defunct).

In the past few years I have done "legendary work" with the C# and Visual Basic teams on language and type-system support for bridging the worlds of object-oriented (CLR), relational (SQL), and hierarchical (XML) data, and of course first class functions. Most recently my team is working on reviving the Mondrian project and other previous research work in the incarnation of Visual Basic for the Cloud; our attempt to democratize distributed dynamic data-intensive applications, i.e. LINQ 2.0. If you want to actually play with the bits you can download the Volta CTP from http://labs.live.com/volta/. Downloads of Volta are temporarily suspended while we are performing a refactoring, however we will be back!.

All my old blog entries have vanished from the real internet, but are still available on the backed-up internet; but you may be interested in my occasional rants on LTU instead.

Be warned that I am an extreme ENTP personality type and so I suffer deeply from all it's weaknesses; especially I exhibit "A lack of sensitivity to the feelings and ways of those who might need reassurance, security or commitment".

Professional activities

In both my personal and professional life, I try to be an active member of the community. Amongst other things, I am or have been:

In the more distant past, I organized a Summerschool on Constructive Algorithmics and a WG2.1 meeting and served as the local project leader of ESPRIT basic research project 3157: "Phoenix; Integration of Functional and Logic Programming".

Publications

Don't forget to check out the NEC research index http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/ and http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/allcited.html.

Rants

Thinkweek Submissions

I try to submit at least one paper to Bill's legendary "think weeks".

Channel 9 and other Videos

After a brief stint of doing comical characters such as Head In The Box and Professor ILDASM, I show my more serious side on Channel 9 interviewing interesting domain experts inside and outside Microsoft.

Press Coverage

It seems that my work is so interesting that it get frequent press coverage.

Internet programming

Since the mid-90's I have been working on making Internet programming easy; or as I as say these days on "democratizing the Cloud".

Components and foreign-language integration

Ever since Raymond Boute introduced me to SASL in 1981, I have been a fundamentalist functional programmer. However, to do useful things you need to interoperate with libraries written in mainstreem languages.

Language Design

Thanks to Kees Koster, I am hooked on programming language design, altough these days I try to avoid language extensions and use post-compilation rewriting as a low-cost alternative.

Software Design

A few versions ago, I was know as "the banana man" because of my work on Squiggol and applying category theory to structure functional programs. It is amazing how vibrant this research area still is so many years later.

Hardware Design

Transforming programs down to circuits is the logical consequence of transformational programming. I wish I had more time to work on this topic.

Graphical User Interfaces

Every self-respecting functional programmer has implemented at least one GUI library. I am no exception.

Parsing

My fascination with parsing is a side-effect of my work opn language design. I guess Kees Koster is the one to blame again.

Compiling

The same holds for compilation.

PhD thesis

My PhD thesis was an attempt to apply transformational programming and Squiggol to transform the denotational semantics of a programming language into a compiler for that language. What I learned is that recursive domains with function spaces are a bitch when it comes to transformations.

Granted Patents

Since joining Microsoft, I have refocused my creative energy from writing research papers to filing patents.