Erik Meijer has been trying to bridge the ridge between theory and practice for most of his career.
He is perhaps best known for his work on, amongst others, Haskell, C#, Visual Basic, and Dart programming languages, as well as for his contributions to LINQ and the Reactive Framework (Rx).
Most recently he is on a quest to make uncertainty a first-class citizen in mainstream programming languages.
Erik's full biography can be found at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Meijer_(computer_scientist).