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January 2007 Anything You Can Do, I Can Do MetaContinued from page 11 By Scott Rosenberg
Ground Control Simonyi's fascination with space has been lifelong. As a 13-year-old, he won a competition to become Hungary's "Junior Astronaut" and traveled to Moscow to meet a cosmonaut. As a new hire at Microsoft in 1981, he convinced cofounder Paul Allen to play hooky from developing the IBM PC's new operating system and fly to Florida to watch the space shuttle's first flight. Simonyi's coming blastoff offers him a full-circle reunion with the Soviet-era technology that set his life's course. He has been training for months at Russia's Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, mastering the details of space suits and space toilets, and learning Russian. The space trip will confirm Simonyi's status as that highly unlikely thing: a celebrity programmer. He has two jets and a pilot's license to fly them. He turns up in the tabloids as the frequent companion of homemaking's high priestess, Martha Stewart. He has built a 233-foot yacht with a wraparound glass-walled deck. He has funded an Oxford professorship for his friend Richard Dawkins, the Darwinian theorist. None of this, of course, will make any difference in the outcome of Simonyi's quest to alleviate the chronic woes of the software field. "It's not enough to be a great programmer," Simonyi once told Michael Hiltzik, author of a history of PARC. "You have to find a great problem." Intentional might never deliver on its grand promises. But no one can charge Simonyi with choosing too modest a problem. His home these days is a mansion on Lake Washington, down the shore from Bill Gates's house, with an art gallery, a glass-enclosed swimming pool, a heliport, a computer lab with magnetically lined walls, and a lathe and drill press in the basement (to fulfill those Erector Set cravings). The house cost $10 million to build: it is tilted at a seven-degree angle and "looks like a slight earthquake hit it," in the words of New York Times writer Patricia Leigh Brown, who marveled at its "hermetically sealed, mathematical precision" and found it "so vast that a visitor can feel like a lonely asteroid rattling around the solar system." "[Only] Charles would build a 20,000-square-foot home with one bedroom," Simonyi's dissertation advisor and PARC colleague Butler Lampson once remarked. The lone bedroom boasts a cockpit-like control center that lets Simonyi tweak all his systems--heating, entertainment, telephone, lighting, and watering--to his satisfaction. "Like a submarine," he explained to Brown. "They all have to be green before you submerge." There's also a pivoting bed, which Simonyi can use to fine-tune his view--out across the lake; or over to the Seattle skyline, with its warrens of office workers wrestling with their documents and spreadsheets; or up into the starry night sky, where his latest journey will soon take him. Scott Rosenberg is vice president of special projects at Salon.com. He is the author of Dreaming in Code. |
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IBM's Symphony for the Office Worker
09/28/2007
Comments
rajuch on 02/07/2007 at 11:38 AM
1
How does it solve the software updates problem? What would happen, if they need to change some features six month from the installation? Can we put the bench back in the machine to refine the bench, or do we need to start over and pay for full new bench? Many online applications are being updated every other month.
If one needs to build a computer table or wooden cabinet, can he use that bench-making machine? Or does he need to build a new machine for each kind of products? I am not joking. You would agree, if you read the following.
We already invented such machines for building online-GUI-applications. Greatly appreciate your feedback, what you think about our online GUI application making machine. Please review brief overview to our application machine:
http://cbsdf.com/technologies/software-irony.htm
Each ‘Component Factory’ in the left side of the Figure#1 acts as a knob, to refine each part (i.e. a loosely coupled component/AC) in the application (shown right side). Please review the following WebPages, which show that this process builds perfect ‘application machine’ with simple to operate knobs to refine each part. Please review summary at the end to understand why it cost only a fraction to refine the application:
http://cbsdf.com/ps_blog/Minimum-couplings.htm
http://cbsdf.com/ps_blog/super-distribution.htm
P.S: Of course, one must use our highly-flexible online-GUI-API to build the online GUI components. You may see interactive GUI Components, which are built using SVG. We will be building the GUI Classes for XAML/Vista in the future.
http://cbsdf.com/technologies/demo-links/Demo-SVGS/misc-charts.html
More sample links at: http://cbsdf.com/technologies/demo-links/demo-links.htm
One may build his own custom GUI Classes, for example, to build multi-player online games or near real-time modeling of Air-traffic, as explained at:
http://cbsdf.com/Newbies/Flight-main.htm
http://cbsdf.com/misc_docs/online-apps-rock.htm
Best Regards,
Raju
sriramv.iyer on 02/13/2007 at 4:59 AM
1
But this article did rekindle my interest in DSLs. (I use python and not lisp, though)
rubs74 on 02/22/2007 at 5:27 PM
1
Model Driven Architecture also adds a new level of abstracction to software development and I guess that takes the base idea of Intentional Programming as well. There are already tools that work on production. Here there's a tool based on MDA that really allows you to think more about the bussiness logic and less about the complexities of building it, just take a look http://www.care-t.com/
JEfromCanada on 03/09/2007 at 3:10 PM
1
bushka on 03/14/2007 at 5:55 PM
1
oscarbhaskar on 06/13/2007 at 10:11 AM
1
The question now is how do we implement the concept? How do we capture the "Intention"?
I think we are about to see a new dimension in the way software is developed.
enterprise on 06/30/2007 at 2:45 PM
1
By Christmas.
We will make sure the writers of this excellent article know in good time.
In the meantime, if you want to be involved with the fun, get in touch on gedymail@gmail.com
GD
Corbier on 12/25/2007 at 2:02 PM
4
For a quick glance at what a language definition file might look like, check out:
www.ucalc.com/lisp.txt (Lisp)
www.ucalc.com/forth.txt (Forth)
The download includes more files like this, which you can load up into the generic interpreter, at which point it becomes an interpreter for the language you just loaded. (The supplied interpreter demonstrates just one possible kind of interface. You can create your own fancy interface to interpret such code).
uCalc LB is no longer in the idea stage. An actual fully working beta implementation can be downloaded.
I am the author of uCalc Language Builder (as well as uCalc Fast Math Parser), and I am looking for early adopters of the uCalc LB technology. An interactive tutorial that comes with the download can walk you trough the various concepts. Other forms of documentation are also included, as well as an interactive interpreter.
--
Daniel Corbier
www.ucalc.com