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1-Feb-2007 | Marketing Ideas to lawyers
AN ARTICLE FROM SUNDAY'S NEW YORK TIMES WE SHOULD READ CAREFULLY.
Awaiting the Day When Everyone Writes Software
By JASON PONTIN
Published: January 28, 2007
BJARNE STROUSTRUP, the designer of C++, the most influential programming
language of the last 25 years, has said that “our technological civilization
depends on software.” True, but most software isn’t much good. Too
many programs are ugly: inelegant, unreliable and not very useful.
Software that satisfies and delights is as rare as a phoenix.
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Sergei Remezov/Reuters
Charles Simonyi, chief executive of Intentional Software, in training
for his trip to the International Space Station, scheduled for April.
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All this does more than frustrate computer users. Bad software is
terrible for business and the economy. Software failures cost $59.5
billion a year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology
concluded in a 2002 study, and fully 25 percent of commercial software
projects are abandoned before completion. Of projects that are finished,
75 percent ship late or over budget.
The reasons aren’t hard to divine. Programmers don’t know what a
computer user wants because they spend their days interacting with
machines. They hunch over keyboards, pecking out individual lines
of code in esoteric programming languages, like medieval monks laboring
over illustrated manuscripts.
Worse, programs today contain millions of lines of code, and programmers
are fallible like all other humans: there are, on average, 100 to
150 bugs per 1,000 lines of code, according to a 1994 study by the
Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. No
wonder so much software is so bad: programmers are drowning in ignorance,
complexity and error.
Charles Simonyi, the chief executive of Intentional Software, a start-up
in Bellevue, Wash., believes that there is another way. He wants
to overthrow conventional coding for something he calls “intentional
programming,” in which programmers would talk to machines as little
as possible. Instead, they would concentrate on capturing the intentions
of computer users.
Mr. Simonyi, the former chief architect of Microsoft, is arguably
the most successful pure programmer in the world, with a personal
fortune that Forbes magazine estimates at $1 billion. There may be
richer programmer-billionaires — Bill Gates of Microsoft and Larry
Page of Google come to mind — but they became rich by founding and
managing technology ventures; Mr. Simonyi rose mainly by writing
code.
He designed Microsoft’s most successful applications, Word and Excel,
and he devised the programming method that the company’s software
developers have used for the last quarter-century. Mr. Simonyi, 58,
was important before he joined Microsoft in 1981, too. He belongs
to the fabled generation of supergeeks who invented personal computing
at Xerox PARC in the 1970s: there, he wrote the first modern application,
a word processor called Bravo that displayed text on a computer screen
as it would appear when printed on page.
Even at leisure, Mr. Simonyi, who was born in Hungary and taught
himself programming by punching machine code on Russian mainframes,
is a restless, expansive personality. In April, he will become the
fifth space tourist, paying $20 million to board a Russian Soyuz
rocket and visit the International Space Station.
Mr. Simonyi says he is not disgusted with big, bloated, buggy programs
like Word and Excel. But he acknowledges that he is disappointed
that we have been unable to use “our incredible computational ability”
to address efficiently “our practical computational problems.”
“Software is truly the bottleneck in the high-tech horn of plenty,”
he said.
Mr. Simonyi began thinking about a new method for creating software
in the mid-1990s, while he was still at Microsoft. But his ideas
were so at odds with .Net, the software environment that Microsoft
was building then, that he left the company in 2002 to found Intentional
Software.
“It was impractical, when Microsoft was making tremendous strides
with .Net, to send somebody out from the same organization who says,
‘What if you did things in this other, more disruptive way?’ ” he
said in the January issue of Technology Review.
For once, that overfavored word — “disruptive” — is apt; intentional
programming is disruptive. It would automate much of software development.
The method begins with the intentions of the people inside an organization
who know what a program should do. Mr. Simonyi calls these people
“domain experts,” and he expects them to work with programmers to
list all the concepts the software must possess.
The concepts are then translated into a higher-level representation
of the software’s functions called the domain code, using a tool
called the domain workbench.
At two conferences last fall, Intentional Software amazed software
developers by demonstrating how the workbench could project the intentions
of domain experts into a wonderful variety of forms. Using the workbench,
domain experts and programmers can imagine the program however they
want: as something akin to a PowerPoint presentation, as a flow chart,
as a sketch of what they want the actual user screen to look like,
or in the formal logic that computer scientists love.
Thus, programmers and domain experts can fiddle with whatever projections
they prefer, editing and re-editing until both parties are happy.
Only then is the resulting domain code fed to another program called
a generator that manufactures the actual target code that a computer
can compile and run. If the software still doesn’t do what its users
want, the programmers can blithely discard the target code and resume
working on the domain workbench with the domain experts.
As an idea, intentional programming is similar to the word processor
that Mr. Simonyi developed at PARC. In the jargon of programming,
Bravo was Wysiwyg — an acronym, pronounced WIZ-e-wig, for “what you
see is what you get.” Intentional programming also allows computer
users to see and change what they are getting.
“Programming is very complicated,” Mr. Simonyi said. “Computer languages
are really computer-oriented. But we can make it possible for domain
experts to provide domain information in their own terms which then
directly contributes to the production of the software.”
Intentional programming has three great advantages: The people who
design a program are the ones who understand the task that needs
to be automated; that design can be manipulated simply and directly,
rather than by rewriting arcane computer code; and human programmers
do not generate the final software code, thus reducing bugs and other
errors.
NOT everyone believes in the promise of intentional programming.
There are three common objections.
The first is theoretical: it is based on the belief that human intention
cannot, in principle, be captured (or, less metaphysically, that
computer users don’t know what people want).
The second is practical: to programmers, the intentional method constitutes
an “abstraction” of the underlying target code. But most programmers
believe that abstractions “leak” — that is, they fail to perfectly
represent the thing they are meant to be abstracting, which means
software developers must sink their hands into the code anyway.
The final objection is cynical: Mr. Simonyi has been working on intentional
programming for many years; only two companies, bound to silence
by nondisclosure agreements, acknowledge experimenting with the domain
workbench and generator. Thus, no one knows if intentional programming
works.
Sheltered by Mr. Simonyi’s wealth, Intentional Software seems in
no hurry to release an imperfect product. But it is addressing real
and pressing problems, and Mr. Simonyi’s approach is thrillingly
innovative.
If intentional programming does what its inventor says, we may have
something we have seldom enjoyed as computer users: software that
makes us glad.
Jason Pontin is the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review,
a magazine and Web site owned by M.I.T. E-mail: [pontin-:-nytimes-:-com].
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