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Charles Simonyi leaves Microsoft
tibbetts writes "The New York Times reports (printable version) (Free blah di blah) that Charles Simonyi, the former chief architect at Microsoft and creator of Bravo, a text-editing program that later became Microsoft Word, has left the company to form his own startup. The focus of his new company is to "simplify programming by representing programs in ways other than in the text syntax of conventional programming languages," which is highly ironic in light of his infamous Hungarian Notation style of naming variables. Perhaps more amazingly, 'Mr. Simonyi has left Microsoft with the right to use the intellectual property he developed and patented while working there.'"
And the Smart Rats are fleeing the ship. I wonder what he knows that we don't know.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
IBM has done a lot of experimentation on developemnt systems along these lines. They never caught on. I remember seeing IBM demos trying to create development systems that anyone could drag and drop their own programs together.
Maybe it's like labview, which is a graphical programming language. Matlab Simulink is another example.
You draw the interface with drag and drop components. The logic is made the same way, by dragging and dropping logic and algorithm icons onto a white board, and then wiring them together. Each component has specific input and output nodes which require data of a certian type.
I use this a lot at work. At first I thought it was just a lame way for people with no programming skills to cobble something together. Now, I like and appreciate it. It will never replace the generality and power of text-based programming, but for specialized programming areas, it works well.
I doubt that he negotiated this arragement upon his leaving. He more likely arranged it long ago, when his future value to the company outweighed the potential value of his contributions.
This does seem unusual (and not just for Microsoft). He had to have hammered this out long before his creations spawned a cash-cow like Word.
First off, I am a long-time C++ programmer (and C before that) with a recent conversion to Perl for anything involving munging text files.
/why/. If you're mucking around at the low level and it's making your high level design look a mess, take it as a clue that your design is not clear. Sure, there are exceptions that have to be coded for. Get them in the model at the right level and save yourself some work. I know programmers who have worn out the Cs and Vs on their keyboards, they cut and paste so much (yes, Windows, sue me).
It has been brought to my attention that no sane programmer would design a record keeping system that involved giving the a customer a text editor and a manual and making him enter his records in a particular format in files with a particular name and extension. Yet that's exactly what we do to ourselves with programming languages.
What we need is something that goes from UML all the way down to ASM, and more importantly, all the way back up. Editable at every level in between. Use colour, fonts, sounds and whatever else you want to indicate the age of a piece of logic (at whatever level), who last changed it and
I don't imagine this is going to be easy. However, the implementation is almost certain to be easier than getting people like me to start using it. Perhaps you youngsters should just write off everyone over 22 and start again. You'll thank us when we're gone.
--
E_NOSIG
Here's one.
I just finished reading Dealers of Lightning which has extensive writing about how Simiyoni got to Xerox and his career there.
It sounds Simonyi has an idea that could be comlimentary to Microsoft's goals He wants to develop a new revolutionary improvement to programming and good programming tools help sell operating systems. The huge number of programs that run on the Windows is probably Microsoft's most significant advantage over Linux, and MacOS (for now anyway).
A visual method of coding data structures, sockets, buisiness rules etc could do for programming what RAD tools did for GUI development. RAD tools enabled someone with very little programming abilitity to build useful programs.
If his ideas are a real success Microsoft might try to buy out Simonyi's company and reintegrate it with the Visual Studio family in the future.
I for one would be interested to see a Slashdot interview with him.
It seems that nobody replying in this thread seems to know anything about what they're talking about.
Charles Simonyi was one of the original four MS employees. He was with Gates, Allen, and Ballmer from the beginning. He hired & led the teams that developed Microsoft's office applications (Word, Excel, etc.). Since the early '90s he has been leading a team of researchers working on Intentional Programming, a new approach to building programs that's still about 10 years ahead of its time (I suggest you read up on it). As far as I understand it, he's leaving Microsoft because the company is no longer interested in spending a lot of R&D money on something that is still too far from marketability.
He's not walking away with IP rights to Word et. al. He's retaining his rights to the work on Intentional Programming, including a bunch of patents. And the reason why he's allowed to retain those IP rights has nothing to do with threats to expose MS business practices. Like I said, the guy is one of the original 4, and he still owns billions in MS stock. He's allowed to take his work on Intentional Programming with him because of his special status and relationship with Gates & Ballmer and because the company is not going to continue pursuing that line of research anyway.
Can we get over the conspiracy theories now?
ToonTalk is a non-text representational programming language. You program by 'physically' manipulating things in a cartoon world in the first person. It's a full, sophisticated language with features like parallel-executing functions and the ability to output your program into Java.
At the moment it's sold as a kids toy, but it clearly represents an entirely different programming paradigm.
I think it's one of the most stunning achievements of the last 10 years in software. It's the work of one person. Go Ken go!
If you have kids, let them try it.
http://www.toontalk.com/
(1) Anyone hear of Lexmark ("Still trying to pretend we aren't really part of IBM") International? Let's say the "new" office suite this guy develops somehow "takes off"... and MS decides to drop their office suite except for the big collaborative business aspects (which, compared to Notes, doesnt exist)....
(2) Didnt this guy write Word before he worked for MS anyway? (not really a question... he did, regardless of or as supported by current belief). Perhaps that is why he has retained the rights... a good contract when he was bought out by MS in the beginning (and thus this isnt something as sinister as possibility #1...)
Dunno - it will be interesting to see how things go. But those are the only things I could think of that would explain why he got to leave with all his IP.
-Rob
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