Intentional Software

2006-02-21

From a very interesting article by Martin Fowler:

I’ve had the opportunity to spend a little time with Intentional Software and several of my colleagues at ThoughtWorks have worked closely with Intentional over the last year or so. As a result I’ve had the opportunity to peek behind the Intentional curtain - although I’m restricted in how much I can say about what I saw there. Fortunately they intend to start opening up about their work over the next year or so.

Whoohoo! I’ve been following the developments around this company for a few years now. Charles Simonyi is mostly known for being one of the influential architects at Microsoft responsible for creating and popularizing such things as WYSIWYG editing, Excell and the Hungarian notation. Simply put, the guy is brilliant. A brilliant guy with a vision: intentional programming/software. Working for Microsoft from the beginning, he is one of their richer Microsoft millionnaires/billionaires (tm). A few years ago he quit his job at Microsoft to start his own company called Intentional Software. Before that he published a few articles on intentional programming which, frankly, include some ideas that are way beyond the imagination of the average C/C++/Java/C#/whatever programmer. While these guys fight over such petty things as syntax, he made it a first class entity in his programming environment. Intentional programming is all about translating intentions to working code. If doing C++ style templates is your intention, define them in the core constructs provided by the intentional programming environment and write them.

But what am I doing, trying to summarize Martin Fowler’s excellent article into one paragraph. Go read his article. It will take you some time but it will be time well spent.

I’ve been a long time fan of Martin Fowler. I should check his sitemore often.