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January 2007 Anything You Can Do, I Can Do MetaContinued from page 7 By Scott Rosenberg
Meta-Euphoria By the early 1990s, Microsoft's success had made Simonyi's fortune. (For several years, Forbes has estimated it to be $1 billion.) But he still felt the tug of unfinished business. Software's confusion had made the creation of Office nerve-racking for Microsoft. But now, with computers more powerful than the Alto on every desk and the Internet linking them together, software's crisis was everyone's crisis. Simonyi began to think it was time to go meta again. "Charles has always tried to build his systems in ways that raise the level of abstraction, so that you can manage the complexity of the system. Because complexity is death," says Chuck Thacker, Simonyi's old colleague from BCC and PARC, who is leading a research project on computer architecture at Microsoft. "And unfortunately, these days, providing the facilities people actually want results in a complex system. We're hanging on with our fingertips right now." Moving to a position at Microsoft Research, Simonyi began to define the concept of intentional programming, or IP for short. Intentional programming would add an entirely new layer of abstraction to the practice of writing software. It would enable programmers to express their intentions without sinking in the mire of so-called implementation details that always threatened to swallow them. Like the "meta-programmers" of Simonyi's dissertation, passing instructions to worker-bee coders, the intentional programmer would hand off the scut work--but not to a junior colleague. Instead, intentional programming called for a sort of code factory called a "generator," a program that takes in a set of relatively high-level commands and spits out more-detailed working code. The goal wasn't so much to ease the labor of programming as to let programmers clear their brains of trivialities so they could actually be creative. From his programming initiation as a teenager punching opcodes into the Ural, Simonyi had been climbing the ladder of abstraction. But he felt he wasn't high enough. In many ways programming still felt primitive. Why were programmers still saddled with incompatible programming-language syntaxes? Why was it so hard to extend their preferred languages into new areas? Why did programmers still work with plain text, arranging a small number of characters into linear strings as they had in the punch-card past? Simonyi's Wysiwyg work had liberated office workers to create and edit complex documents. Engineers and designers were using advanced CAD/CAM tools to design and modify blueprints for skyscrapers and airplanes. Why were programmers, the wizards who'd made all this possible, still pecking out their code one character at a time? His Microsoft Research team got to work, and by March 1995 they had built a working system for constructing programs using the intentional-programming approach. Simonyi said IP had "achieved complete self-sufficiency": that is, "all future work on IP would be done using IP itself." He rewarded his team with T-shirts emblazoned with one of his favorite pictures from childhood: the image of Baron Munchausen lifting himself and his horse out of a bog by tugging at his own hair. Simonyi announced intentional programming to the world in a September 1995 paper titled "The Death of Computer Languages." It was time, as he later put it, "for the cobbler's children to get some shoes." |
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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