Removing Software Complexity

t482 writes "Charles Simonyi (ex Xerox Parc & Microsoft ) says that Software "has become a field where we focus on incremental improvements in processes. That course is futile, because it can never solve the problem of human imperfection." Even as software collapses under the weight of its own complexity, we've barely begun to exploit its potential to solve problems. The challenge, Simonyi believes, is to find a way to write programs that both programmers and users can actually read and comprehend. Simonyi's solution? To create programming tools that are so simple and powerful that the software nearly writes itself. "Software should be as easy to edit as a PowerPoint presentation," Simonyi asserts."

Comments

Re:m_lpstrnzCharlesSimonyi

[GCP]

I don't know who you are, but the chance that you're qualified to call Simonyi "stupid" is statistically insignificant.

Hungarian notation is a means for overcoming a critical flaw in the C language: the lack of type safety. There are about a million different "abstractions" that look to your C compiler like just a sequence of bytes. C code collects bugs like a porch light every time you try to evolve your code by changing abstractions. Hungarian notation, macros, other coding conventions, special "lint" tools, etc., are pretty much all designed to reduce the problems caused by the poor design of C itself.

Simonyi contributed a workaround that's useful to those who know when and how much to use it.