Charles Simonyi president and CEO of Intentional Software. Credit: Brian Smale

On April 9, at a remote launchpad on the plains of Kazakhstan, a ground controller will finish his countdown; a Soyuz rocket will fire; and Charles Simonyi--Microsoft's former chief architect, the tutelary genius behind its most famous applications, the inventor of the method of writing code that the company's programmers have used for 25 years, and now the proponent of an ambitious project to reprogram software--will begin his ascent into space.

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