Simonyi and intentional software

News from infoq.com from the JAOO Conference in Denmark

At the JAOO conference in Denmark today, Charles Simonyi (recent space tourist, and ex-Microsoft lead architect of Word & Excel) summarized a brief history of software as a struggle between the separation of the problem and the solution, referring to the mismatch between how domain experts think about and store their domain knowledge and how programmers have to store and rewrite that knowledge to build software to serve those domains.

The vision of Intentional Software, the company Charles founded is a world in which domain experts can write their requirements in any notation or input form that is familiar/comfortable to them (boxes, lines, tables, formulas,etc) and this "domain code" is used as a first class citizen within the software development project, used as an input around which the rest of the application gets generated. Business users write the domain code, developers write the program generators.

The vision has been developed into the "Domain workbench" product by Intentional Software, who has been working on it for over 5 years and is currently going through private beta testing and production use at a couple of consultancies, including Capgemini. The domain workbench fits all the requirements of a Language Workbench as defined by Martin Fowler.

Domain code is represented behind the scenes in a tree structure called the "intentional tree" which can be projected into multiple notations to allow business users to express domain code in different ways most suitable for them.

Read full article