Charles Simonyi on Intentional Software Joining Microsoft
intentional.com
intentional.com
I'd love to be proven wrong, though, and hope to see some of the "intentional" stuff in any real software product.
Did the Intentional website have any info on their work before the acquisition? There's nothing there now.
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 me too much about the intentsoft tech itself (though I can probably give rough answers for any high level stuff if you're curious).
Is the Pole Position cabinet still there? Did anyone ever fix the monitor? I miss that thing.
Congrats to everyone there!
Many, fondly. Where they a "evolutionary dead-end" or just commercial, and thus less likely to succeed in an open source world?
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.
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/
My two cents is it's more about usability than anything else.
> Afterwards a couple of people said it was the most important demo they'd ever seen, comparing it even to the Mother of all Demos. For many there was a sense that the whole world of software development had just changed.
We'll probably see SSIS and Excel integration soon...
The only thing that is notably missing from IDEA is the graphical representation: but raise your hand if you ever missed to see your program represented as a flowchart, for example. Does it actually have any real value? Perhaps, while you are learning programming.
The diagrams that are actually important and useful are mostly architecture diagrams and are impossible to create from source code - and it is also very hard to generate meaningful programs from architecture diagrams.
(raises hand).
>Does it actually have any real value?
Yes.
>Perhaps, while you are learning programming.
Or when you're trying to understand the structure of a program you've just been assigned to work on, or that you wrote years ago and have to do a change, or when you want to see the big picture, etc etc.
Ever worked with a visual language?
Watching Eric Evans talk about DDD along the example of maps was a real eye opener for me. This: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/model-to-work-evans
I tried to use tools like Enterprise Architect in the past but failed to produce anything useful with them (that includes architecture diagrams - charts based on standards never seem to be fit for what I actually wanted to communicate).
The closest I ever got to usefulness was with database structures, we did manage to generate the actual production schema from ERwin for a SQL database at one place I worked, but of course, not the stored procedures.
While some tools might be more or less accommodating, there's nothing about visual representation per se that can't do that (including filtering the non-important parts, producing something akin to UML's interaction diagrams, etc).
Best demo we ever gave while I was there, by a longshot.
Prompted me to wonder if they were still around, which led me to their Glasdoor reviews page which is sort of entertaining popcorn fodder[2].
Then lo and behold a few weeks later the acquisition popped up in the news. Synchronicity at work I guess.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreaming_in_Code [2] https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Intentional-Software-Revie...
Gotta love the Baader-Meinhof Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ....
He later joined Microsoft in 1991, where he started Word.
Also reminds me of subtextual (jonathan edwards phd)
Really? This smells like over-fitting the research to justify a desired commercial outcome.
Not a good idea for code that you want people to be able to use without gaining a deep understanding of, but for collaborating on inventing new things, it's a very effective communication hack.
To see complete and total saturation of that concept, take a look at the source code of Urbit
I can confirm this is roughly what the intentional source code looked like.
Personally I found it a huge pain and an unnecessary difficulty, but opinions differed :). The bigger problem was a lot of the code was crap (yay research code!). The lack of english names only made this more difficult because it removed valuable clues as to what the intention of the author might have been.
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.
You'll get a lot of the benefits simply by being really disciplined about being consistent and precise with how you refer to things. What Hungarian does is force you to out of necessity.