History

History of the Software Technology Group in Utrecht

The leader of the group since its initiation until his retirement in 2013, Doaitse Swierstra, had a strong focus on developing compiler tools and compilers in Haskell and for Haskell. Together with Atze Dijkstra he initiated the Utrecht Haskell Compiler (UHC). A light version is available from Hackage.

He also initiated and maintains many other Haskell package that support the building of compilers (See here for a list). Important among these are Utrecht University Attribute Grammar system for implementing tree-walks using synthesized and inherited attribute grammars. It has been used in the development of the UHC and the Helium compiler. In addition, he worked on parsing combinators libraries in Haskell, that also be found on Hackage.

At his farewell speech in May 2013, he was presented a Liber Amicorum that can be downloaded here.

Lambert Meertens, developer of the Bird-Meertens formalism one of the editors of the ALGOL 68 report and originator and designer of the ABC programming language that had a major influence on the  Python language, is a long-time visitor to Utrecht and professor emiritus in the group.

Erik Meijer and Daan Leijen, his PhD student, moved on to Microsoft, the latter to Microsoft Research. Daan developed lots of material, much of which is still in use: his Parsec library is part of the GHC base libraries, his LVM backend has been used by Helium for a long time. Additionally, he and Erik developed phantom types that later led to the definition of Generalized Abstract DataTypes (GADTs).

The Helium for Haskell compiler, that is still being maintained by the people in the group was initiated by Arjan van IJzendoorn and Rijk-Jan van Haaften. Later on, Bastiaan Heeren, who now works at the Dutch Open University, and Daan Leijen made major contributions. 
 
Andres Löh and Ralf Hinze collaborated with Johan Jeuring on the Generic Haskell Compiler. The compiler itself is no longer being developed, its main ideas having found its way into Haskell libraries. Ralf is currently a professor in Germany, after a spell at Oxford University. Andres returned some time after completing his PhD to Utrecht, and left in 2010 to become a partner and Haskell consultant at Well-Typed LLP.

Eelco Dolstra invented the Nix package manager for his PhD under the supervision of Eelco Visser. This later evolved into [NixOS](https://nixos.org/). His supervisor Eelco Visser worked on tools like Stratego and XT while at Utrecht, before he moved to Delft University where he is now a full profesor. These tools now form a part of the Spoofax Language Workbench.

Many members of the group were involved in 2006 and 2007 in the organisation of the world-wide ICFP Programming contest 2007. The results were presented at ICFP 2007 in Freiburg, and published on in ICFP 08.

Tanja Vos did her PhD in Utrecht and after moving to Valencia in Spain, she is now also professor at the Dutch Open University. Lex Bijlsma who was associate professor in Utrecht in the group also moved to the Open University to work there until his retirement.

The SERC (Software Engineering Research Center) was a started as a spin-off  to bridge the gap between research and industry. It later fused with CIBIT.

Past members

* Frank Atanassow
* Pablo Azero Alcocer
* Ade Azurat
* Arthur Baars
* Anya Bagge
* Patrick Bahr
* Lex Bijlsma
* Jeroen Bransen
* Martin Bravenboer
* Juan Cardona
* Koen Claessen
* Dave Clarke
* Vladimir Costas Jauregui 
* Atze Dijkstra
* Eelco Dolstra
* Luc Duponcheel
* Alex Elyasov
* Samuel Feitosa
* Henrique Ferreiro
* Marja Flipse
* Gert Florijn
* Rik Van Geldrop
* Alex Gerdes
* Rui Guerra
* Tom Harper
* Fritz Henglein
* Ralf Hinze
* Stefan Holdermans
* Merijn De Jonge
* Karl Trygve Kalleberg
* Pim Kars
* Ruud Koot
* Matthijs Kuiper 
* Jose Labra Gayo
* Sean Leather
* Arthur Van Leeuwen
* Daan Leijen
* Andres Löh 
* José Pedro Magalhães
* Lambert Meertens
* Erik Meijer
* Arie Middelkoop
* Ivica Milovanovic
* Veelasha Moonsamy
* Oege de Moor
* Thomas van Noort
* Karina Olmos Joffre
* Piet van Oostrum
* Hielko Ophoff
* Maarten Pennings
* Nigel Perry
* Adri de Raaf
* Frans Rietman
* Jan Rochel
* Alexey Rodriguez Yakushev
* Amir Saeidi
* Joao Saraiva
* Martijn Schrage
* Kaisa Sere
* Doaitse Swierstra
* Rob Udink
* Americo Vargas Villazon
* Edwin Veenendaal
* Rob Vermaas
* Nico Verwer
* Marcos Viera Larrea
* Eelco Visser
* Harald Vogt
* Tanja Vos
* Frank Wester