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

Northwestern University Northwestern University (NU) is a Private university, private research university in Evanston, Illinois, United States. Established in 1851 to serve the historic Northwest Territory, it is the oldest University charter, chartered university in ...

. He is also a member of the PLT group and, as such, responsible for the creation and maintenance of DrRacket. In addition to DrRacket, 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 project. Findler received his PhD at

Rice University William Marsh Rice University, commonly referred to as Rice University, is a Private university, private research university in Houston, Houston, Texas, United States. Established in 1912, the university spans 300 acres. Rice University comp ...

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 in his twenties. He received his PhD from Indiana University Bloomington under the direction of Daniel P. Friedman. ...

. His dissertation was on the linguistics of software contracts, popularly known as

design by contract Design by contract (DbC), also known as contract programming, programming by contract and design-by-contract programming, is an approach for designing software. It prescribes that software designers should define formal, precise and verifiable ...

. 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. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

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

Fortress A fortification (also called a fort, fortress, fastness, or stronghold) is a military construction designed for the defense of territories in warfare, and is used to establish rule in a region during peacetime. The term is derived from L ...

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 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 programming language, general-purpose, High-level programming language, high-level, Modular programming, modular, Functional programming, functional programming language with compile-time type checking and t ...

'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 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