The more the meta - 'Intentional Software' meets reality?

This quite long Technology Review article catches up with Charles Simonyi - Microsoft's former Chief Architect and the alleged inventor of Hungarian variable naming convention - who will be rocketing up to the International Space Station in April.

In his day job, he has been developing a 'new' concept now known as 'intentional software'; for every problem domain, developers will create generic tools which users can employ to "guide the software's future evolution".

Code generators, CASE tools and IDEs could all be seen as primitive examples of what he's on about. They also point to the possible fly in the ointment. As you approach the problem boundaries, any preconceived tool inevitably becomes increasingly inefficient; and the abstraction often makes it difficult or impossible for the user/developer to interfere productively. This is the law of leaky abstractions.

That's not to say that domain-specific generators are a bad thing per se; the template driven generator underlying Constellar Hub was a key component in its success, allowing us to quickly improve and extend the range of objects it could generate. When the tool runs out of steam, code developers can simply jump out of the tool and modify the generated code (sadly, that seems to be the permanent situation for most J2EE - more code and less declarative than any 1980s 4GL) or use a different abstraction.

But as far as Simonyi's work goes, you can count me in with the sceptics. Changing the representation of a problem (from textual code to a graphical parse tree, for example) does not in itself make the problem easier to solve. I saw my first 'visual' coding system in about 1981 - on a VT100 at that - and it was both brilliant and (without a mouse) completely **** useless at the same time. Still, it will be fun watching him throw all his money at it...

Ciao!