Robert Bruce Findler, colloquially known as "Robby", is an American computer scientist, currently, a professor of computer science at

Northwestern University Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. Charte ...

. He is also a member of the PLT group and, as such, responsible for the creation and maintenance of

DrRacket Racket is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language and a multi-platform distribution that includes the Racket language, compiler, large standard library, IDE, development tools, and a set of additional languages including Typed R ...

. In addition to

, Findler has contributed numerous components to Racket and supervises its Web-based software library, called PLaneT. Findler is also a leading team member of the

ProgramByDesign The ProgramByDesign (formerly TeachScheme!) project is an outreach effort of the PLT research group. The goal is to train college faculty, high school teachers, and possibly even middle school teachers, in programming and computing. History Matt ...

project. Findler received his PhD at

Rice University William Marsh Rice University (Rice University) is a Private university, private research university in Houston, Houston, Texas. It is on a 300-acre campus near the Houston Museum District and adjacent to the Texas Medical Center. Rice is ranke ...

under the direction of

Matthias Felleisen Matthias Felleisen is a German-American computer science professor and author. He grew up in Germany and immigrated to the US when he was 21 years old. He received his PhD from Indiana University under the direction of Daniel P. Friedman. Afte ...

. His dissertation was on the linguistics of software contracts, popularly known as design by contract. His work on software contracts provides a more careful accounting of blame, thereby helping programmers quickly home in on the faulty part of a software system. In addition to DrRacket and software contracts, Findler focuses on the design and implementation of a workbench for semantics engineers. This workbench, called Redex, is a tool for specifying and executing the reduction semantics of a

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

. It is used by programming language researchers in the US and Europe. Most recently, SUN's

Fortress A fortification is a military construction or building designed for the defense of territories in warfare, and is also used to establish rule in a region during peacetime. The term is derived from Latin ''fortis'' ("strong") and ''facere'' ...

research team used Redex to specify and explore key parts of their language. Findler served as the semantics editor of the Revised^6 Report on the

Scheme A scheme is a systematic plan for the implementation of a certain idea. Scheme or schemer may refer to: Arts and entertainment * ''The Scheme'' (TV series), a BBC Scotland documentary series * The Scheme (band), an English pop band * ''The Schem ...

programming language. He and his PhD student Jacob Matthews developed a Redex model of the core semantics, which is included as an appendix of the report. The appendix plays the same role as

Standard ML Standard ML (SML) is a general-purpose, modular, functional programming language with compile-time type checking and type inference. It is popular among compiler writers and programming language researchers, as well as in the development of the ...

's formal specification (Milner, Tofte, Harper, MacQueen) but is executable and thus can visualize individual examples.

Awards

In 2018, he and others were awarded the

SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award SIGPLAN is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on programming languages. Conferences * Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) * Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) * International Symposium on ...

for their work on Racket In 2012, he and

were awarded the Most Influential ICFP Paper Award for their work on contractsMost Influential ICFP Paper Award
retrieved October 16, 2021

References

External links

Home page
at the Northwestern University
Google scholar profile
Programming language researchers Living people Rice University alumni Northwestern University faculty Year of birth missing (living people) {{Compu-scientist-stub