Flatt received his PhD atRice University in 1999, under the direction ofMatthias Felleisen.[3] His dissertation is on the mechanics of first-class modules andmixin classes. His work triggered research in theML community on mutually recursive modules and in theobject-oriented community on mixins and traits.[4][5][6]
Flatt served as one of four editors of the Revised^6 Report on theScheme programming language. The report is influenced by his design ofRacket, especially the module system, the exception system, the record system, the macro system, and library links.[7]
In 2014, Flatt was elected anACM Distinguished Member.[8] In 2018, Flatt received the ACM SIGPLAN's Programming Languages Software Award (jointly with the Racket core team).[9] The citation highlights Racket's singular significance both in research and education. The research part refers to its powerful macro system, which is integrated with its novel module system. Other impacts, for example cited in the Revised^6 Report on Scheme, concern Racket's exception system and its resource management subsystem. The education aspect is about the TeachScheme! (also known as Program by Design)[10] project, which over decades morphed into the Bootstrap[11] curriculum.
^Flatt, Matthew; Krishnamurthi, Shriram; Felleisen, Matthias (1998-01-21)."Classes and mixins".Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages - POPL '98. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 171–183.doi:10.1145/268946.268961.ISBN978-0-89791-979-1.
