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Charles Simonyi on Intentional Software Joining Microsoft

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Re: Charles Simonyi on Intentional Software Joining Microsoft

#31

Post by narag »

haspok wrote: post #10

It always amazed me that during their ~10 years of existence they never actually produced anything visible, other than demos. I remember I had been very excited about their "intentional" approach, even though so many years later I tend to think that it is actually an evolutionary dead-end (anyone remembers 4GL and 5GL languages? The late 90s when CASE tools and visual IDEs like Delphi were all the rage?). There is no…

The late 90s when CASE tools and visual IDEs like Delphi were all the rage?). There is no silver bullet.

You seem to imply that Delphi was a fad that fell short of what it promised. On the contrary, it was incredibly productive. The reasons it has become a niche product have nothing to do with the validity of its features.

So if you are wondering why IS hasn't some product to show, it's not because the ideas are wrong, it's because tools are a very difficult area where execution is more important and readiness is all.

Re: Charles Simonyi on Intentional Software Joining Microsoft

#32

Post by wbradley »

SpindleyQ wrote: post #22
DonaldFisk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Joel Spolsky, Hungarian notation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation ) has been misunderstood (as System Hungarian). In its intended form (Apps Hungarian), it's a good idea: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/05/11/making-wrong-code-...

This is true. We used Hungarian Notation internally extensively. The most counterintuitive thing is that having a cryptic name for a concept can have advantages: it has a precise meaning, and if you don't know what it is, you can't convince yourself that you do. If there's a class in my code called, I don't know, "View", that's going to give me clues as to what it is, but it may also mislead me into thinking it shoul…

For about three years I maintained the official internal coding conventions documentation for the Microsoft Word development team. This was when we were working on Office 2007. I remember loving the spirit of Hungarian notation. Using it in practice was also a major lesson and shaped my valuation of naming variables and types.

That same timeframe we ported Word's codebase from C to C++. That meant rewriting a bunch of manually ordered vtables for COM as regular virtual member functions on classes, and sadly, the elimination of anonymous unions from the codebase. But, type systems have really taken over and I think that's a good thing.

Because Word was written in C it followed a beautiful pattern of functions calling other functions all the way down. It treated data as data, and did not utilize classes or inheritance. I later came to understand the value of that way of thinking but at the time I thought it was so old fashioned. Of course, lacking the OO mindset meant that Word also lacked a great deal of encapsulation, and had horrible coupling across certain modules. Most notably, Undo, and Display.

I suppose that's enough reminiscing for now.

Re: Charles Simonyi on Intentional Software Joining Microsoft

#35

Post by tyingq »

narag wrote: post #31
haspok wrote: post #10

It always amazed me that during their ~10 years of existence they never actually produced anything visible, other than demos. I remember I had been very excited about their "intentional" approach, even though so many years later I tend to think that it is actually an evolutionary dead-end (anyone remembers 4GL and 5GL languages? The late 90s when CASE tools and visual IDEs like Delphi were all the rage?). There is no…

The late 90s when CASE tools and visual IDEs like Delphi were all the rage?). There is no silver bullet. You seem to imply that Delphi was a fad that fell short of what it promised. On the contrary, it was incredibly productive. The reasons it has become a niche product have nothing to do with the validity of its features. So if you are wondering why IS hasn't some product to show, it's not because the ideas are wron…

I suspect RAD/4GL will come back into fashion once someone gets a web version of it right. The current crop of tools aren't quite there, as they don't let you work outside the hard rails.

Google's "app maker" looks pretty close, but with issues around per user cost for some use cases. It does support freeform code, both client and server side, so no hard rails https://developers.google.com/appmaker/

Re: Charles Simonyi on Intentional Software Joining Microsoft

#36

Post by phlakaton »

My introduction to intentional software was by way of the book "Generative Programming: Methods, Tools, and Applications" by Czarnecki and Eisenecker. I can't say that the book has had broad application to my engineering work, but it's been fun to think about from a philosophical perspective, bits like feature modeling have stuck, and even the early research into IP covered in the book impressed me...

Re: Charles Simonyi on Intentional Software Joining Microsoft

#38

Post by gfodor »

SpindleyQ wrote: post #16
WaxProlix wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked there for about a year, there were a number of contracts fulfilled using the workbench and associated technology (mostly NDA). At some point there was a pivot to a graphics-heavy reinterpretation of the core tech, which was pretty secretive and so didn't get a lot of press. My project didn't use the core 'intentional' tech and we got spun off into an atrociously mismanaged, doomed sub-startup, so don't ask m…

I worked at Intentsoft in its earlier days (2006-2011) and left just as it was really starting to seriously staff up. I look at the pictures of the office these days and it's so surreal to me to see the absurd growth of what had stayed a small team for a really long time. Is the Pole Position cabinet still there? Did anyone ever fix the monitor? I miss that thing.

Hey is this the intentsoft alumni thread? :)

Congrats to everyone there!

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