Question: what do you like inventing?

Philip Wadler answered on 15 Jun 2010:

I design programming languages. This involves working out new ways for people to express ideas. A lot of what I do involves mathematics. One of the things I find most amazing is that the basis of the family of programming languages that I work with was invented by a logician named Alonzo Church in the 1930s, before the first computers were built in the 1940s! So what I like best is when I can find a way to use mathematics to make it easier to build computer programs. I’m really pleased that I played a role in taking one idea that was developed for applications to algebraic topology in the 1950s, and it now plays a key part in a new programming language released by Microsoft in 2010. The language is called F#. It wasn’t designed by me, but it was designed by people who know, and who used some ideas I helped develop.

Languages I’ve been involved with include Haskell, XQuery, and Java. XQuery is used on the web, and Java is used on the web and in phones (especially for games you can download). My new language is called Links. It’s named that because of links on the web, but its also named for The Links, the world’s oldest public golf course, which is near where I work.