Charles Simonyi, Intentional Software Corporation

Charles Simonyi is co-founder, President and CEO of Intentional Software Corporation.

Simonyi was employed by Microsoft Corporation from 1981, where he held titles of Director of Application Development, Chief Architect, and most recently, Distinguished Engineer. While at Microsoft, Simonyi hired and managed teams that developed Microsoft Multiplan, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and other best selling software applications. Simonyi worked at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) from 1972-1980 where he created the first WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) text editor called Bravo. Born in Budapest, Hungary, Simonyi earned his B.S. in engineering mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley, and a doctorate in computer science from Stanford University. He received a honorary doctorate from the University of Pecs in Hungary, in 2001. Simonyi has been a member of the National Academy of Engineering since 1997, elected for his contributions to "widely used productivity software." Simonyi has been also serving on the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton since 1998. He has endowed a chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University and a chair for Theoretical Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, among many other educational and charitable contributions.

Simonyi is an avid collector of modern art, enjoys classical music and is an experienced pilot.

Presentation: "Intentional Software"

Track: Domain Specific Languages, and Beyond

Time: Tuesday 14:30 - 15:30

Location: SAS Dania

Abstract: The complexity of software code results in a software creation bottleneck. The complexity is due to the intermingling of the domain knowledge from programmers and domain experts that needs to co-exist in the running code. Wysiwyg editors simplified document creation by separating the document contents that the editor operated on from the formatting transformations. In the same way Intentional Software simplifies software creation by separating the domains of the software from the production of the software. By separating the domains of the software, domain experts can work in parallell with programmers on their respective areas of domain expertise and the repeated intermingling can be automated. Intentional Software is building a new Domain Workbench where multiple domains can be defined, created, edited, transformed and integrated during software creation. Key features of the Domain Workbench are the uniform representation of multiple interrelated domains, the ability to project the domains in multiple editable notations, and the simple access to the domain code by a program generator.

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