I have two personal, intertwined research goals: learning how to design programs systematically and creating a language that helps me express my thoughts.

My first goal is to discover how to design programs, components, and programming systems systematically. I don't know any other way to understand design than to program and re-program and re-re-program small and large programs. As I am getting to understand what happens, I am writing things down in How to Design Programs, How to Design Components and How to Design Systems, ordinary text books at first glance but a second look will pay off. One day I may distill the ideas in to a small little book called How to Design.

My second goal is to design a programming language that supports the programming styles needed for my first goal. Racket is the evolving subject of this project. I recently had a chance to lead-author the Racket Manifesto, which spells out my perspective on this 20-year-old and on-going project. Please read the paper if you want to know what the Racket project is all about.

With my current and former students I work on a variety of projects in support of the Racket project:

• the transition from untyped scripts to typed programs, with Ben Greenman, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt (Indiana University), and Stephen Chang (UMass Boston)
• component mechanisms and software contracts, with Cameron Moy, Christos Dimoulas (Northwestern) and Robby Findler (Northwestern)
• improving macro technology for the design of domain-specific language, with Leif Andersen, Michael Ballantyne, Ryan Culpepper (Prague Technical) and Matthew Flatt (Utah)
• a novel framework for programming concurrent actors with Sam Caldwell and Tony Garnock-Jones

Financial support for my research currently comes from NSF, DARPA, AFOSR, CISCO, and Mozilla. Past funding sources include CORD, US DoED, Exxon, Microsoft, and Texas ATP.