Philip Wadler, one of the principal designers of the Haskell programming language, is a central figure in the research behind @Cardano ($ADA). Haskell underpins the core of the blockchain, an
Philip Wadler, one of the principal designers of the Haskell programming language, is a central figure in the research behind @Cardano ($ADA). Haskell underpins the core of the blockchain, and Wadler has worked on its smart contract tooling through @IOGroup.
The Royal Society describes Wadler as a principal designer of Haskell, noting his contribution to its two main innovations, type classes and monads. The University of Edinburgh says his research has influenced the design of widely used languages including Java, Go, Swift and Haskell.
At Input Output Global (IOG), Wadler is a co-creator of Plutus alongside Manuel Chakravarty. IOG describes Plutus as the blockchain's smart programming language. Wadler's current title at the company is Principal Research Fellow, according to his University of Edinburgh biography.
Wadler has also contributed to IOG research on the extended UTXO model, the ledger model used by Cardano, according to the same IOG article.
In 2023, Wadler was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. The University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics noted that he joined a list of past fellows that includes Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. The Royal Society's citation credits him with introducing type classes and monads, and with helping to bring generics to Java.
Wadler's recent research includes Plinth, the language used to write Cardano smart contracts. A 2025 paper presented at the ACM SIGPLAN Haskell Symposium, co-authored by Wadler and Chakravarty, says Plinth (formerly Plutus Tx) reuses a subset of Haskell syntax and has been in commercial use since 2021. The paper adds that Plutus programs run on a machine with a formal specification in Agda, a proof assistant, which supports work on verifying that contracts behave as intended.
For developers, the appeal is that Plinth programs use standard Haskell syntax and types, according to the paper's authors. The same paper notes that more than half a dozen smart contract languages now exist within Cardano alone.
Royal Society: Professor Philip Wadler FRSUniversity of Edinburgh: Remarkable scientists join Royal SocietyACM Digital Library: Plinth, a Plugin-Powered Language Built on Haskell
