I am a programmer who by day practices his craft using existing tools and by night works on better tools.

My main focus these days is Libretto, which grew out of dissatisfaction with existing tools for concurrent programming with effects in mainstream programming languages. Even the libraries for functional programming with effects underdeliver in type-safety, declarativeness and programs as first-class values. (More about this at Libretto's Motivation.)

More generally, I am disturbed by the stagnation of the programming discipline, which hasn't really caught up with concurrency and distribution, among other things. Distributed systems are held together by strings and duct tape. The comfort and guarantees of statically typed code end at the boundary of a single process running on a single machine. But it does not have to be that way. I am sure that emphasis on programs as (actual) values, as pursued in Libretto, can bear fruit in areas other than Libretto's current focus (concurrent programming with effects).

However, I often feel that programmers are basically happy with the current state of affairs. Sure, they would like faster compile times and better error messages, but other than that we have it all figured out. Let's just roll with the duct tape!

By sponsoring my work, you show me that you find it meaningful and that you are not happy with the duct tape.