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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.
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.
er the link in the article doesn't require registration.....
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 ?
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.
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.
Has he heard about COLORFORTH ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
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.
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
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.
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
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."
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.
www.eFax.com are spammers
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.)