Technology Review: Part I: Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta is an interesting article about Charles Simonyi, former chief software architect at Microsoft and the designer of Microsoft Office. Bill Gates calls Simonyi, "one of the great programmers of all time."
Simonyi is asking the question, "why is it so hard to create good software?" He has started a company called Intentional Software with the goal of addressing typical problems with software being over budget, behind schedule, unreliable and hard to use.
An article in ZD net says,
"Simonyi is looking to strip time, cost, and inefficiency out of the laborious collaboration that often takes place between requirement setters (subject matter experts) and the software programmers that do their bidding. If Intentional Software makes good on that promise, it will be a rare success in the black-art of turning mortal non-programmers into software engineers without ever having to lift one line of code."According to the "Technology Review" article,
"If Simonyi has his way, programmers will stop trying to manage their clients' needs. Instead, for every problem they're asked to tackle--whether inventory tracking or missile guidance--they will create generic tools that the computer users themselves can modify to guide the software's future evolution."
The article is written by Scott Rosenberg vice president of special projects at Salon.com, and author of Dreaming in Code
.A couple of things in the article caught my eye.
We've all heard of Moore's Law where Intel founder Gordon Moore predicted that processing power would double (or cost would halve) every 2 years. The article mentions a related law known as Wirth's Law from programming expert Niklaus Wirth, the designer of Pascal - which states,
"Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster."
Scott Rosenberg reports a humorous encounter with Charles Simonyi in his Bellevue, Washington office. Charles (the designer of Microsoft Office) is using Microsoft Office Powerpoint, having some problems with it, and the "Office Assistant" paper clip keeps popping up to "help". From the article -
"In the corner of the left-hand screen, a goggle-eyed paper clip popped up: the widely reviled "Office Assistant" that Microsoft introduced in 1997. Simonyi tried to ignore the cartoon aide's antic fidgeting, but he was stymied. "Nothing is working," he sighed. "That's because Clippy is giving me some help."
I was puzzled. "You mean you haven't turned Clippy off?" Long ago, I'd hunted through Office's menus and checked whichever box was required to throttle the annoying anthropomorph once and for all.
"I don't know how," Simonyi admitted, with a little laugh that seemed to say, Yes, I know, isn't it ironic?"
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