When you drive a new car off the lot, you can assume it won't need repairs for a long time (unless you crash it). But when you install a Microsoft program on your computer, you assume that your next step will be to download security patches and bug fixes. A July 2002 feature in these pages asked why software is so bad and wondered whether programmers shouldn't be held to the same quality standards as other workers equally critical to our industrial civilization, such as mechanical, electrical, and civil engineers.

That unresolved question has inspired one of software's leading lights to propose a radical answer. As Scott Rosenberg reports in this issue (see "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta"), Charles ­Simonyi, Microsoft's chief architect during its formative years, has started a company dedicated to developing an entirely new approach to writing code. Though it's unclear whether he'll succeed, it is clear, as Charles C. Mann wrote five years ago, that the software business has singular problems.