Prior to joining Microsoft he was an associate professor at Utrecht University and adjunct professor at the Oregon Graduate Institute. Erik is one of the designers of the standard functional programming language Haskell98 and more recently the C-Omega language. Following is the abstract of Erik's "6GL features languages to come" JAOO 2005 presentation. The JAOO 2005 folks' definition of 6th Generation Languages is: "6GLs seek to go beyond scripting to full blown application languages which are easier to use and more productive than Java/C# languages or generators."