His research focuses on programming languages, and he is a prominent author in the field.
Over the 1970s, Friedman and Wise explored the topic in depth and also considered extensions to the world of parallel computing.
He explored the use of macros for defining programming languages; with Eugene Kohlbecker, Matthias Felleisen, and Bruce Duba, he co-introduced the notion of hygienic macros in a 1986 LFP paper that is still widely cited today.
[3] With Christopher T. Haynes and Mitchell Wand, he simultaneously studied the nature of continuation objects, their uses, and the possibilities of constraining them.
[4] Following that, Friedman and Felleisen introduced a lambda calculus with continuations and control operators.