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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.'"
I always prefered Reverse Polish myself.
Let's hope he isn't allowed to take Clippy the animated paper clip with him. die Clippy die.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
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.
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main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
There's a programming language called LabView (http://www.labview.com). Programs in this language aren't textual but rather lke graphical machines that you can easily visual the data flow through. This doesn't ultimately make programming necessarily easier though... scientists without CS degrees that still want to program their scientific instruments just often happen to have an easier time visualising LabView programs, that's all.
Mr. Simonyi has left Microsoft with the right to use the
intellectual property he developed and patented while working there.
That's only because Bill Gates owns his soul.
I personally don't think that either a purely visual approach is necessarily better. Anyone looking into this should probably build it from the ground up by looking closely at how actual programmers write code, and treat it as a usability problem. Try to reduce key-stroke redundancy, and figure out ways to reduce errors. A friend of mine and I once considered writing a language editor which guaranteed that at any time, the program displayed in the editor window was syntactically correct. This would mean autogeneration of text (auto-completion of variables and syntax), and restrictions to prevent the developer from entering impossible code.
I think the mistake people have made is often to start out with unfounded assumptions about how it should be done - such as assuming that a "drag and drop elements, then connect them up with lines" approach is the right direction (I don't think it is - or we would all be programming with Javabeans right now).
Unlike most of the management at Microsoft (Ballmer), Charles Simonyi is definetly technical.
:).
Not mentioned in this article, he developed the Multiplan interface, which a gazillion of CPM based boxes used, the first version of Access, and had peripheral involvement of the development of the first Mac GUIs.
This guy started writing programs on a soviet vacuum tube (Ural II) computer. He snuck into Eastern Europe, and from there moved to the US.
If I had any cash I would invest in his company.
which is highly ironic in light of his infamous Hungarian Notation style of naming variables.
It was a technique for making types easy to identify in a language (C) that doesn't have any native way of indicating type. In BASIC, you know that A$ is a string. In Perl, you know that @names is a list. In C you don't know what "last_position" is. A pointer? An index? A floating point vector? It's not as if Hungarian Notation was designed to be the ultimate language-independent programming tool.
This guy invented the hungarian notation yet his name is not an anagram of Satan, Baalzebub or Lucifer. Or has I missed something ? Or is it in the name of his new start-up ?
Well it all depends on how you see it. Ever had to change an int to a long in a very very huge program? That's kind of a big search 'n replace. Besides I really think that it makes code unreadable... If I don't know what type a variable is, I prefer to look up the declaration. But then I just probably am a bad programmer.
Just name the var what it is supposed to represent. If it is representing an age, call it "age" and not "iAge". Just my opinion.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Could it be that maybe this man just wants a change of pace? Maybe he wants to move geographically? Maybe he wants more freedom to spend time with people important to him? Maybe he just decided to do it on a whim? Can we consider that maybe, just maybe, this has nothing to do with Evil Empire Microsoft (TM), politics, Open Source, or geekiness?
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
This topic raged recently on comp.object.
There are basically two common candidates: drag-and-drop "box-and-line" diagrams, and tables (my favorite).
I argued that OOP puts too much of the "noun modeling" into code. The more that is put into tables (relational databases), the easier it is for me to search, sort, filter, navigate, etc. the information (assuming decent relational tools).
The alleged downside is that algorithms are decoupled from data, which is "bad" in most OO philosophy. However, I don't see any huge penalty of this, and the benefits of being able to apply relational algebra and relational modeling outweigh any small drawbacks IMO. Besides, I have put code into tables on occasion.
I personally find code more rigid than a (good) relational system. In procedural/relational programming, mostly only "tasks" end up dictating code structure, and not the noun models, noun taxonomies, and noun relationships; which are all subject to too much change and relativism to use code to manage IMO. OOP is too code-centric WRT noun modeling.
It is probably subjective, so I hope that whatever he comes up with to replace code, it does not become forced down everyone's throat if it catches on in all the PHB mags. One-size paradigm/approach does NOT fit all.
Perhaps he can strive to make all 3 methods (code, tables, diagrams) interchangable. That way a given developer can use the representation that he/she likes the most without shop-wide mandates.
Table-ized A.I.
Guess you didn't read "Unlike the other three men, Mr. Simonyi, who holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University, always worked on the technical side of the company rather than as a business manager."
He didn't work on the business side of the company. He was a hard core geek, thinks, codes, and collects a check.
It's been done; for example Lisp represents programs as data structures rather than text. The structures are often obtained by scanning a text notation, but that is not strictly necessary. Sometimes the structure is manufactured by the program itself. Or it could come from some GUI manipulations, whatever. I wonder what Simonyi could be up to in this area that is original? (Original to the entire computing world, that is, not just ignorant pockets thereof).
He isn't hitting anything new as far as technology goes. Five years ago there was a company called FastTech that had tools called Graphiq and Cellworks.
Graphiq provided a rudimentary GUI that let you plan program flow with individual modules coded in something called C-- (this is no joke).
CellWorks provided a much better GUI but a different low level language that resembled in only the worst possible ways: Basic.
What we discovered using these tools is that they could indeed be powerful and almost any yahoo could use them. Once you wanted to solve something complicated and the problem immedietly started to look like programming 101.
In other words, complicated things are complicated, and it doesn't matter what the tool is. If you want to solve it you need someone specialized in that tool to solve it.
It's as simple as that.
Beware the wood elf!!!
If it weren't for Charles Simonyi, I wouldn't be proud to be Hungarian at parties...
:P
Wait... I never actually get invited to parties... damn... day dreaming again...
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
You're right, the Open Source community is much better at playing catch-up than innovating anyway.
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
Mr. Simonyi has left Microsoft with the right to use the intellectual property he developed and patented while working there.
If he patented stuff, he owns the rights to it and can use it if leaves MS. Now if his work was patented in MS' name, then he couldn't take it.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
But I hate it when my programs get stuck in the vacuum cleaner.
Has he heard about COLORFORTH ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
That's so totally wrong that I hardly know where to begin. Patents have both inventors and owners, with only the latter really meaning anything legally. It's standard practice throughout the industry for employee agreements to require that ownership of patents be turned over to the company, so all the actual inventor(s) get is their names on the patent and maybe a bronze plaque if the company's feeling generous (which they weren't for my patent). There's very little Simonyi can do about it; the employer almost invariably holds all the cards.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hey! The printable version that was linked to didn't blah di blah me when I tried to access it! Maybe this is the cure for all of the NYT registration stuff, link to the printable version rather than the one with ads. Of course, I'll miss seeing all of the ads, but I'm willing to make the sacrifice.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
'Mr. Simonyi has left Microsoft with the right to use the intellectual property he developed and patented while working there.'
Hrrrmmm - Does this mean that, if he gets struck down by God in a blinding flash of light, he could be converted and release his stuff under GPL?
Quick - you get the camera flash, and I'll get the sodium pentathol...
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Companies can not get patents. Typically the human gets the patent and assigns the rights to the company.
A quick peek into the USPTO shows the Simonyi has something like 8 patents (probably from two applications, one of which was split into many parts) all of which are assigned to Microsoft.
So, Microsoft must have granted him rights to use the patents in his new venture. And Microsoft must have gotten something in return or they have not acted in the interest of their shareholders. What they got is the mystery.
See PARC's history and search for "Bravo", or read the summary below:
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
there is also the chance that his contract was written when MS was merely a 75lb gorilla, and is more fair than their current contracts.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Patents have both inventors and owners, with only the latter really meaning anything legally
Sorry to nit pick on one detail, but:
If the inventor(s) are not listed correctly (if an individual contributed toward the invention but was not listed as an inventor on the patent) then the patent can be invalidated.
So the inventor designation does have legal ramifications on a patent.
You forgot the end of the sentance:
'Mr. Simonyi has left Microsoft with the right to use the intellectual property he developed and patented while working there.'
Last time I checked, works for hire belong to the company - not the employee. This is generous of Micro$oft. It gets to that sticky area that when you develop something, even in your spare time, there is a chance that the company you work for can claim it (they have first 'dibs' on it). There are a lot of instances where companies sue the pants of employees when they try to do this.
Then again, Microsoft may let him go now and come after him later - let him turn it into a success and then claim it was a work-for-hire later.
It's why 'freelance' open-source developers should be careful to make sure their current (and any future) employer won't snatch away their work.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
Here's one.
'Mr. Simonyi has --left-- Microsoft with the right to use the intellectual property he developed and patented while working there.'"
:)
"Left", as in he left it there, for them to use, or...
"Left", as in departed with that right so that it was no longer there and they couldnt use it.
dont tell me i need to read the damn article....
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Wow, I get to be the first person to post something actually informative.
/ /w ww.research.microsoft.com/ip/g /digerati/simonyi/simonyi_p1.ht mlw .aisto.com/roeder/active/ifip96.pdf
Simonyi was big on what he called 'Intentional Programming' (yes, as opposed to UNintentional programming, which is what we've been doing all along I suppose.) It's been in the works since at least '94 which is when a classmate of mine went to work on the project after graduating.
He got shafted as the power inside the dev tools group shifted. Most of his group got cut loose and ended up looking for other positions, Oddly enough, Simonyi himself left the group and gave up on it a year or so ago apparently without telling the remaining core of the group.
See:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000815211509/http:
http://www.edge.or
http://www.omniscium.com/nerdy/ip/
http://ww
Hugarian notation is EVIL, and here's why.
....
....
...
....
/* ????? */
...
...." but otherwise the notation creates more problems than it is worth.
Consider a large program, in which we manipulate lots of ints. We have lots of pointers to ints, so our code looks like:
int *piFoo = &bar;
*piFoo += 1;
*--piFoo = 5;
and so on.
Now, we discover that ints aren't big enough - we need to use longs.
long *piFoo = &bar;
*piFoo += 1;
*--piFoo = 5;
OK, now we have two equally bad choices:
1) We leave the variable names alone. But now they are lying, and therefor are introducing more errors.
2) We change the variables. Now what SHOULD have been a simple change is rippling all over the code.
Even if you do as you should, and use a typedef, things are still bad:
typedef int Thingy;
Thingy *pThingy_mythingy = 0;
....
How do you create the "warts" for typedefs without creating ambiguity?
It gets even worse if you have structures:
struct Narf
{
int *pi_Poit;
};
....
*narf.pi_Poit = 5;
....
Now, you have to rev all the items that reference that structure, all documentation that refers to that structure, etc.
I can somewhat understand the use of a leading "p" to indicate "pointer to
The proper place to trace variable types is not in the name of the type! It should ideally be traced by your editing environment, along with the location of the variable's definition, the location of it's instantiation, the location of it's initialization, and any comments that you want to assign to the variable.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Drag 'n Drop one's own programs together? Been there, done that, in 1994 no less. NeXTStep Developer.
I just finished reading Dealers of Lightning which has extensive writing about how Simiyoni got to Xerox and his career there.
To all the die-hard C programmers who refuse to make the Linux kernel C++ compatible because they are using variable names such as "new", let me point out that this wouldn't be a problem if you had called the variable nNew, gNew, new_p, or any kind of mangled name at all.
Let me just point out that C++ is not a feature.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Could it be that the real reason Simonyi wants away from Microsoft is that he's interested in aspect-oriented programming? And the language that's getting the buzz in aspect-oriented programming is AspectJ, where J stands for Java? And promoting Java would be a career-limiting move at Microsoft for anyone these days?
Instead of the Times article, look at this one in the Washington Post which gets a little closer to this interpretation.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Odd that no-one's posted this yet.
The company can be found at http://intentionalsoftware.com/ with some vague-but-cool-sounding stuff about changing the world.
"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped." --Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
First of all, have YOU ever heard of it refered to as "search and destroy"? Quite frequently such operations end up screwing things up because the SnR tool got confused.
Second, you are driving changes in files that you shouldn't have to change. As a result, you clutter up your revision control system with a bunch of crap.
Third, if you deal with any kind of QA department, they will insist upon verifying all code that you've changed - "But it was a simple search and replace" won't cut it (nor should it!). So you will have QA time being spend on verifying a bunch of things that you shouldn't have to verify.
The whole idea behind ANY programming methodology, be it OOP, Hungarian notation, extreme programming, team programming, or whatnot, is to make things easier . Anything that adds more work than it saves is a loss. I assert that the time saved by being able to tell that piFoo is a pointer to integer is much less than the time costs Hungarian notation imposes.
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Charles S.: I'm leaving to go my own stuff
Bill G.: Charles, you'll have to give up your rights to all the stuff you've developed over the years
Charlies S.: Did I metion that I still have a copy of those memos that the government never saw?
Bill G.: Well when you put it like that, I'll give you the rights to all your stuff. Need any cash? No? Here have some anyway. Anything else I can do? Anything at all? Coffee, Water? Sure..?
I for one would be interested to see a Slashdot interview with him.
Hyslop and Sutter on Hungarian
(In summary, don't.)
Yup. There was a D&D module that was published that contained dawizard tables. Because the guy that wrote the module wrote about mages but the editor decided to call them wizards and did a search-and-replace.
As a general rule you're correct, however in this case it's actually the other way around. Languages that support a 'variant' data type do not require type checking (strong or weak) because type conversions are handled automatically (you never have to cast anything or even worry about what type anything is. 99% of the time the compiler figures out what you meant based on the code you typed in. This leads us to the usefulness of Hungarian Notation:
Hungarian Notation allows the code to be more meaningful to the reader. This creates less work for the programmer because in languages with a 'variant' data type more work is already being done by the compiler. If you are adding an integer to a string, but the string happens to contain a number, then the compiler will automatically calculate the value that is the sum. The sum can then be concatenated to another string or added to another number, whatever you choose. Of course, the risk with this kind of thing is that you accidentally write code that means the wrong thing and the compiler doesn't complain. That's where Hungarian notation comes in: It forces you to think about what the code means when you are writing it. I think that for most people this is a Good Thing.
Amazing magic tricks
Hungarian Notation saves our ass. My group maintains several million lines of code, and we change variable types all the time. By changing both the type of the variable and the prefix on its name, we effectively cause all code that referenced that variable to fail to compile. This is the desired result.
The task of progogating a change of variable type includes visiting the affected code and verifying that the change will not have unwanted consequences. It almost always does. Hungarian notation allows you to do this quickly, effectively, and in a single pass. Waiting for the regression test to come back negative is reckless and unprofessional.
We don't allow code to be checked in if it is not in HN. If it can't be visually audited for type correctness by an independent team, without the use of an IDE or some type of code browser, it's a liability and therefore has no business in our code base.
-Hope
There is plenty Microsoft could do. However Microsoft tends to behave as a rational actor.
The release does not discuss the funding of the new venture but I would not be at all suprised if Gates, Balmer, Microsoft were investors. If so providing access to IP is not suprising.
I would not be suprised if there was not some sort of reciprocal IP agreement so Microsoft can use IP developed by the new company.
It is unlikely that the new company is going to grow so big that it puts Microsoft in the poor house. On the other hand they can probably buy it if it does lok like it has a winner.
Companies like Microsoft tend to find it very hard to get existing sales and marketing organizations to accept a new product that might canibalize an existing market (see Christiansen's Inovator's dilema). It is actually more effective to buy in R&D even at what appears to be a ludicrous premium over the cost of building from scratch.
Take Vermeer as an example, it is very unlikely that they would ever have made $180 mil in sales let alone profit. Microsoft has earned many times that from distributing their product, Frontpage through their existing channels.
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Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I've been increasingly troubled that I perhaps was alone in thnking textual representation fo source code is silly. As a Java programmer, every IDE under the sun ahs a little side panel where the structure ofyour class is represented as a tree, and as you clickon elements in the tree, the file jumps to that delcaration.
Turns out, though, that it doesn't really matter that method A appears before method B in the file. Code folding is a very simple step in this direction. And all of this arguing over tabs vs. spaces, curly-braces on their own line, etc. would be obliterated if code were stored in some other, unformatted manner.
I know IBM's alphaWorks has a project that transforms Java into XML and back. Once in unformatted XML, it is easier to see if a file changed functioanlly whereas typical diff programs would higlight a curly brace being moved to its own line.
Now the interesting thing I found out there is that the *other* founder is Kiczales, a Xerox PARC person who was a prime mover in the Aspect-Oriented programming movement. So it looks like we have here is a start-up featuring really smart people whose efforts to do world-changing programming tool/language research did not get anywhere in the large companies they previously worked for. Or something like that.
The success rate for start-ups is not very high, but this is at least an interesting sort of venture, unlike so many of the dot-coms of the past few years.
Babar