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INTENTIONAL PROGRAMMING | Edge.org

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To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves. Introduction By John Brockman During the 1970s at Xerox PARC, Charles Simonyi led a team of programmers in the development of Bravo, the first WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) word-processing editor. Bravo was a fundamental departure from the way information was previously displayed and organized and it was part of PARC's contribution that changed the face of computing and ultimately led to personal computing. Simonyi, born in Budapest, Hungary, holds a bachelor of science degree in engineering mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley and a doctorate in computer science from Stanford University. He worked for the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center from 1972-80 and joined Microsoft in 1981 to start the development of microcomputer application programs. He hired and manage

JB: What's new, Charles? SIMONYI: I have been working on what we call "intentional programming." It's very exciting. It has to do with professional programming, so it's kind of hard to get into the details. It also relates to the work of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in a fairly direct way. We are trying to create an ecology of abstractions. Abstraction is really the most powerful tool that we have in thinking about problems. An abstraction is a single thing, yet if it is a good one, it can have many applications, even an infinite number of them. So an abstraction may be looked at…

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