Erik Meijer is an accomplished programming-language designer who has worked on a wide range of languages, including Haskell, Mondrian, X#, C-Omega, C#, and Visual Basic. He runs the Data Programmability Languages Team at Microsoft, where his primary focus has been to remove the impedance mismatch between databases and programming languages. One of the fruits of these efforts is LINQ, which not only adds a native querying syntax to .NET languages, such as C# and Visual Basic, but also allows developers to query data sources other than tables, such as objects or XML. Most recently, Erik has been working on democratizing the Cloud using Volta and preaching the virtues of fundamentalist functional programming in the new age of concurrency and many-core. Some people might recognize him from his brief stint as the "Head in the Box" on Microsoft VBTV.

We are hiring

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/.

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:

• Initiator and organizer of the International Summer Schools on Advanced Functional Programming series.
• One of the designers of the lazy functional programming language Haskell98.
• Secretary of IFIP Working Group 2.8 on Functional Programming.
• Member of the board of directors of Software Engineering Research Center in Utrecht (SERC).
• Invited speaker at the First International Spring School on Advanced Functional Programming (1995), the Second Fuji International Workshop on Functional and Logic Programming (1996), the 6th International Workshop on Functional and Logic Programming (1997) in Germany, the NSF Workshop on Recent Results and Undergraduate Curriculum Innovations (1997), the Third International Summer School on Advanced Functional Programming (1998), the International Conference on Functional Programming 1998, ECOOP 2001, NJPLS, ETAPS 2003
• Member of the program committee for PLILP'95 and PLILP'96, the Second Fuji International Workshop on Functional and Logic Programming, the 1997 Haskell Workshop, IFL'97, ICFP'98, HW'99 (chair), HW'00, PADL 2001, MOP 2002, the OOPSLA 2002 Poster Sessions, CGO 2003, COCV 2003, ECOOP 2006.

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.

Thinkweek Submissions

• Coming soon ...

Channel 9 and other Videos

• Expert to Expert: Contract Oriented Programming and Spec#
• Erik Meijer, Gilad Bracha, Mads Torgersen: Perspectives on Programming Language Design and Evolution
• Expert to Expert: Erik Meijer and Bertrand Meyer - Objects, Contracts, Concurrency, Sleeping Barbers
• JAOO 2007: Joe Armstrong - On Erlang, OO, Concurrency, Shared State and the Future, Part 1
• JAOO 2007: Joe Armstrong - On Erlang, OO, Concurrency, Shared State and the Future, Part 2
• JAOO 2007: Erik Meijer and Dave Thomas - Objects, Functions, Virtual Machines, IDEs and Other Fun Stuff
• Tier Splitting Volta: Who. What. How. Why - Part 1
• Tier Splitting Volta: Who. What. How. Why - Part 2
• Erik Meijer: Functional Programming
• Erik Meijer Shows Us His Favorite Visual Basic 9.0 Feature - XML Literals
• Pimp My Language
• Paul Vick and Erik Meijer - Dynamic Programming in Visual Basic
• Erik Meijer: Democratizing the Cloud
• Anders Hejlsberg, Herb Sutter, Erik Meijer, Brian Beckman: Software Composability and the Future of Programming Languages
• Outstanding Technical Achievement: C# Team
• Erik Meijer about Volta, GWT and Democratizing the cloud
• Erik Meijer and Brian Beckman on Tesla
• Erik Meijer on LINQ

Press Coverage

• Sharp Words with Microsoft's Erik Meijer, Mary Jo Foley.
• Look Sharp, Mary Jo Foley.
• Microsoft delivers test build of its ‘Volta’ cloud-programming toolset, Mary Jo Foley.
• Microsoft architect compares Volta and Google's GWT, Mary Jo Foley.
• A (Microsoft) Code Name a Day: Volta, Mary Jo Foley.
• ‘Volta’: Microsoft’s dev platform in the Cloud?, Mary Jo Foley.
• Why the Sharp Languages still matter, Mary Jo Foley.
• Microsoft X# on tap, Mary Jo Foley.
• Microsoft Ships Volta Web Development Tool, Darryl K. Taft.
• Microsoft Volta - a cool new RIA technology, Ryan Steward.
• Microsoft creates GWT clone, Ed Burnette.
• Volta: Browser capabilities on steroids, John Carroll.
• Is Microsoft's Volta a Java Killer?, Jennifer LeClaire.
• Microsoft bridging relational, object, XML data models, Paul Krill.
• Xen and X#: One and the same, Joe Wilcox.
• Microsoft Research Looks to extend C#, Joe Wilcox.
• Microsoft Expands .NET with Xen, Robyn Peterson.

Internet programming

• Erik Meijer, and Dragos Manolescu. LINQ-to-DataCenter, CCA-08 submission.
• Erik Meijer. Democratizing The Cloud With Volta, OOPSLA 2007 Demo.
• Erik Meijer. LINQ 2.0: Democratizing the Web, In Proc. XTech 2007.
• Erik Meijer and Danny van Velzen. Haskell Server Pages: Functional Programming and the Battle for the Middle Tier, In Proc. Haskell Workshop 2000.
• Erik Meijer. Server side web scripting in Haskell, Journal of Functional Programming, 10(1):1-18, January 2000.
• Erik Meijer, Daan Leijen, and Jim Hook. Client-side Web Scripting with HaskellScript, In Proc. PADL, 1999.
• Erik Meijer and Joost van Dijk. Perl for swine: CGI programming in Haskell, In Proc. First Workshop on Functional Programming, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1996.

  This paper won the best talk award at the 1996 Dutch Unix Users Conference

Components and foreign-language integration

• Erik Meijer and Clemens Szyperski. Overcoming Independent Extensibility Challenges, In Communications of the ACM. Vol. 45, No. 10, pp. 41–44, October 2002.
• Erik Meijer and John Gough. A Technical Overview of the Commmon Language Infrastructure.
• Erik Meijer and Clemens Szyperski. What's In A Name: .NET as a Component Framework, In Proc. First OOPSLA Workshop on Language Mechanisms for Programming Software Components.
• Erik Meijer and Sigbjorn Finne. Lambada, Haskell as a Better Java, In Proc. Haskell Workshop 2000.
• Daan Leijen and Erik Meijer. Domain Specific Embedded Compilers , In Proc. 2nd USENIX Conference on Domain-Specific Languages'99 .
• Sigbjorn Finne, Daan Leijen, Erik Meijer, and Simon Peyton Jones. Calling Hell from Heaven and Heaven from Hell, In Proc. ICFP'99.
• Daan Leijen, Erik Meijer, and Jim Hook. Haskell As An Automation Controller, volume 1608 of Springer LNCS, Braga, Portugal, 1999.
• Riccardo Pucella, Dino Oliva, and Erik Meijer. Aspects de la programmation d'applications Win32 avec un language fonctionnel . In Proc. 98 French workshop on applicative languages.
• Sigbjorn Finne, Daan Leijen, Erik Meijer, and Simon Peyton Jones. H/Direct: A Binary Foreign Language Interface for Haskell , In Proc. ICFP'98, 1998.
• Simon Peyton Jones, Erik Meijer, and Daan Leijen. Scripting COM Components in Haskell, In Proc. International Conference on Software Reuse, 1998.

Language Design

Software Design

• Ralf Lämmel and Erik Meijer, Mappings Make Data Processing Go 'Round, to appear in proceedings of GTTSE 2005.
• John Launchbury, Erik Meijer, and Tim Sheard, editors. Advanced Functional Programming, volume 1129 of Springer LNCS, Olympia, USA, 1996.
• Johan Jeuring and Erik Meijer, editors. Advanced Functional Programming, volume 925 of Springer LNCS, Bastad, Sweden, 1995.
• Erik Meijer and Johan Jeuring. Merging Maps and Folds for Functional Programming. LNCS 925, 1995.
• Akihiko Takano and Erik Meijer. Shortcut Deforestation in Calculational Form. In Proc. FPCA'95, 1995.
• Erik Meijer and Graham Hutton. Bananas in Space: Extending fold and unfold to Exponential Types. In Proc. FPCA'95.
• Luc Duponcheel and Erik Meijer. On the Expressive Power of Constructor Classes. In Functional Programming Glasgow 1994, Workshops in Computing. Springer, 1994.
• Erik Meijer, Maarten Fokkinga, and Ross Paterson. Functional Programming with Bananas, Lenses, Envelopes, and Barbed Wire. In Proc. FPCA'91, volume 523 of LNCS. Springer-Verlag.
• Maarten Fokkinga and Erik Meijer. Program Calculation Properties of Continuous Algebras. Technical Report 91-4, CWI, 1991.

Hardware Design

• Graham Hutton and Erik Meijer. Back to basics: Deriving Representation Changers Functionally. Journal of Functional Programming, 6(1):181-188, January 1996.
• Erik Meijer. Hazard Algebra and the Design of Asynchronous Automata. In Functional Programming Glasgow 1992, Workshops in Computing. Springer, 1992.

  It is nice to see that in 2001, this paper still generates interest in a course on Advanced Logic Design & Switching Theory at the University of Southern California. I surely had a lot of fun writing it and designing little asynchronous automata.

Graphical User Interfaces

• Koen Claessen, Ton Vullinghs, and Erik Meijer. Structuring Graphical Paradigms in TkGofer. In Proc. ICFP'97, 1997.

Parsing

• Daan Leijen and Erik Meijer. Parsec: A Practical Parser Library. Submitted to Haskell Workshop, June 2001.
• Graham Hutton and Erik Meijer. Monadic Parser Combinators. Journal of Functional Programming, 8(4):437-444, Cambridge University Press, July 1998.
• Graham Hutton and Erik Meijer. Monadic Parser Combinators. Technical Report NOTTCS-TR-96-4, Department of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, 1996.
• Johan Jeuring, Maarten Fokkinga, Lambert Meertens, and Erik Meijer. Translating Attribute Grammars into Catamorphisms. The Squigolist, 2(1), 1991.

Compiling

• Erik Meijer, Ross Paterson. Down With Lambda-Lifting. Unfinished draft.
• Erik Meijer. More Advice on Proving a Compiler Correct: Improve a Correct Compiler. In PHOENIX Seminar and workshop on declarative programming, volume 91 of Workshops in Computer Science. Springer-Verlag, 1992.
• Erik Meijer. A BMF for Semantics. Periodica Polytechnica, Ser. Electrical Engineering, 35(1):1-17, 1991. Technical University of Budapest.
• Erik Meijer. A Taxonomy of Backtracking. In Computer Science in the Netherlands 1989. SION, 1989.
• Erik Meijer. A Taxonomy of Function Evaluating Machines. In proc. 1988 `Aspenas' workshop on the implementation of functional languages. Chalmers University of Technology Report 53, 1988.
• Erik Meijer and Kees Koster. The M-Machine. In Computer Science in the Netherlands 1988, Volume 1, pages 45-61. SION, 1988.
• Erik Meijer. Generalized Expression Evaluation. Technical Report 88-5, KUN, 1988.
• Erik Meijer. Petri net Models for the lambda-calculus. In Advances in Petri nets, volume 266 of LNCS. Springer-Verlag, 1987.

PhD thesis

• Erik Meijer. Calculating Compilers. PhD thesis, Nijmegen University, 1992.

Granted Patents

• 7155703, Virtual Method Protection.
• 7168063, System and Methods For Employing Tagged Types In A Dynamic Runtime Environment.
• 7219329, System and Methods Providing Lightweight Runtime Code Generation.
• 7389498, Core Object-Oriented Type System For Semi-Structured Data
• ...more coming...(lots more)