David Thrane Christiansen

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  • Personal: david at davidchristiansen dot dk

I want programming to be a creative dialog between human and machine, where human creativity is aided by mechanical attention to detail. To do this, I work with advanced type systems, metaprogramming, and domain-specific languages. In particular, I wrote a fair bit of the first version of Idris, I’ve worked with Dan Friedman on making dependent types more accessible through The Little Typer, and I wrote Functional Programming in Lean.

I work full-time on Lean, an interactive theorem prover based on dependent types that is also a quite nice programming language. In the past, I was the Executive Director of the Haskell Foundation, and I had more traditional software development roles at Deon Digital in Copenhagen, Denmark and Galois in Portland, Oregon, USA. Before that, I was a postdoc with Sam Tobin-Hochstadt at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. I completed my Ph.D. at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, in January 2016 under the supervision of Peter Sestoft. Before getting married, I was known as David Raymond Christiansen.

Functional Programming in Lean

Functional Programming in Lean is a free online book that introduces key topics in functional programming, such as monads, monad transformers, type classes, and inductive datatypes, using the dependently typed language and interactive theorem prover Lean 4. Despite using a cutting-edge research language, the book is intended to be accessible for readers who know how to program, but have never before used a functional language like Haskell, OCaml, or Scheme. This work was generously supported by Microsoft.

The Little Typer

Dan Friedman and I wrote book on dependent types in the tradition of The Little Schemer. It was released on September 18, 2018, from the MIT Press.

Publications

Dependently Typed Haskell in Industry (Experience Report) (pdf, video)
David Thrane Christiansen, Iavor S. Diatchki, Robert Dockins, Joe Hendrix, Tristan Ravitch
In Proc. of 24th International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP ’19)
Berlin, Germany, August, 2019
A description of challenges and benefits from dependently typed Haskell at Galois.

Extensible Type-Directed Editing (pdf)
Joomy Korkut, David Christiansen
In Proc. of the Workshop on Type-Driven Development (TyDe)
St. Louis, Missouri, USA, September, 2018
Idris’s interactive editing features are now extensible in Idris itself.

Efficiency of a good but not linear nominal unification algorithm (pdf)
Weixi Ma, Jeremy Siek, David Christiansen, Daniel P. Friedman
In Workshop on Unification (UNIF)
Oxford, England, July, 2018
Faster nominal unification using a hybrid named-nameless representation of terms

Sequential Decision Problems, Dependent Types and Generic Solutions (pdf)
Nicola Botta, Patrik Jansson, Cezar Ionescu, David Christiansen, Edwin Brady
In Logical Methods in Computer Science 13(1)
A generic solver for sequential decision problems, in Idris

Elaborator Reflection: Extending Idris in Idris (pdf, acm, video)
David Christiansen, Edwin Brady
In Proc. of 21st International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP ’16)
Nara, Japan, September, 2016
Making the elaboration facilities available for metaprogramming in Idris

Type-Directed Elaboration of Quasiquotations: A High-Level Syntax for Low-Level Reflection (pdf, acm)
David Christiansen
In Proc. of 26th International Symposium on Implementation and Application of Functional Languages (IFL ’14)
Boston, Massachusetts, USA, October, 2014
A means of implementing quasiquotation in the context of a type-directed tactic-driven elaborator

Pension Reserve Computations on GPUs (pdf, acm)
Christian Harrington, Nicolai Dahl, Peter Sestoft, David Christiansen
In Proc. of Workshop on Functional High-Performance Computing (FHPC ’14)
Gothenbug, Sweden, September, 2014
A description of generation of fast GPU code for solving the Thiele’s differential equations, generated from a high-level description of a class of life insurance and pension products

Dependent Type Providers (pdf, acm)
David Christiansen
In Proc. of Workshop on Generic Programming (WGP ’13)
Boston, Massachusetts, USA, September, 2013
A mechanism for allowing datatype indices to be about something outside the language

Banana Algebra: Compositional Syntactic Language Extension (pdf)
Jacob Andersen, Claus Brabrand, David Christiansen
In Science of Computer Programming, Vol. 78(10), Elsevier, 2013

Software Development for the Working Actuary (pdf, poster)
David Christiansen
In Proc. of 4th International Symposium on End-User Development (IS-EUD ’13)
Copenhagen, Denmark, June, 2013
A short paper describing ongoing research and associated poster

Formal Semantics and Implementation of BPMN 2.0 Inclusive Gateways (pdf)
David Christiansen, Marco Carbone, Thomas Hildebrandt
In Proc. of Web Services and Formal Methods (WS-FM ’10)
Hoboken, New Jersey, USA, September, 2010

Manuscripts

The Final Pretty Printer (pdf)
David Christiansen, David Darais, Weixi Ma
An extensible pretty printer with semantic annotations and proportional-width fonts

Reflect on Your Mistakes! Lightweight Domain-Specific Error Messages (pdf)
David Christiansen
Presented at TFP 2014, Soesterberg, The Netherlands, May, 2014
A mechanism for displaying error messages for embedded languages using the terms of the embedded language rather than the host language

Selected Talks

Open-Source Opportunities with the Haskell Foundation (video)
David Christiansen
Presented at FOSDEM 2023

Industrial Strength Laziness: What’s Next? (Invited Keynote) (video)
David Christiansen
Presented at Haskell Symposium 2022

Predictable Macros for Hindley-Milner (pdf, video)
Langston Barrett, David Christiansen, Samuel Gélineau
Presented at TyDe 2020

Bidirectional Type Checking (video)
David Christiansen
Presented at C∘mp∘se 2019

A Little Taste of Dependent Types (video)
David Christiansen
Presented at flatMap(Oslo) 2018

A Little Taste of Types (video)
David Christiansen
Presented at Code Mesh 2017

Elaborator Reflection: Extending Idris in Idris (video)
David Christiansen
Presented at ICFP 2016

A Pretty Printer that Says What it Means (video)
David Christiansen
Presented at Haskell Implementors’ Workshop 2015

Coding for Types: The Universe Pattern in Idris (video)
David Christiansen
Presented at Curry On 2015

Type Providers and Error Reflection in Idris (video)
David Christiansen
Presented at Compose 2015

Tool Demonstration: An IDE for Programming and Proving in Idris (pdf)
Hannes Mehnert, David Christiansen
Presented at DTP 2014

An Actuarial Programming Language for Life Insurance and Pensions (pdf)
David Christiansen, Henning Niss, Klaus Grue, Kristján S. Sigtryggsson, Peter Sestoft
Presented at ICA 2014

Teaching

Projects

My current project is Klister, an exploration of how to make hygienic procedural macros type-aware, while still providing a predictable programming model. "Current project" is a bit of a stretch, really - I’ve mostly been a cheerleader for it lately.

I’m a contributor to the first version of Idris, a functional programming language with full dependent types. In particular, I’m to blame for Idris’s take on type providers, quasiquotation, and the reflected elaborator.

I am a co-author and former maintainer of the Idris IDE for Emacs, which attempts to unite the interaction styles of SLIME, agda-mode, and ProofGeneral, and to be a practical environment for writing runnable code using dependent types.

At IU, I worked on integrating proofs with macro expansion with Sam Tobin-Hochstadt.

Ph.D. and M.Sc. Theses

I defended my Ph.D. thesis, Practical Reflection and Metaprogramming for Dependent Types, on January 7, 2016. It describes a suite of metaprogramming features for Idris, including a means of quoting Idris’s core language using high-level Idris syntax, a way to rewrite error messages that arise from embedded languages, and a reflection of Idris’s elaborator into a monad with effects in the type checker.

My M.Sc. thesis (Danish speciale) describes Idris’s type providers, which allow dependent types to talk about values obtained from effectful computations that can observe the world in which the program finds itself being typechecked.

Miscellaneous

I’ve created some tutorials in connections with my teaching duties. In case they are useful outside of the specific courses for which they were designed, they are now online.

I’m a co-host of The Type Theory Podcast.

I’m a fluent user of English and Danish. I can also get by in Swedish and Esperanto, if necessary.