Intentional Software

Intentional Software
IndustrySoftware engineering
FoundedSeptember 2002
FounderCharles Simonyi
Gregor Kiczales Edit this on Wikidata
DefunctApril 2017
FateAcquired by Microsoft
Headquarters
Key people
Charles Simonyi (co-founder), Eric C. Anderson (CEO)
Number of employees
50-100
ParentMicrosoft Edit this on Wikidata
Websitehttp://www.intentional.com

Intentional Software was a software company that designed tools and platforms that followed the principles of intentional programming[1] in which programmers focus on capturing the intent of users and designers, and spend as little time as possible interacting with machines and compilers.[2] Its tools included language workbenches, tools that separated software function from implementation, and allowed 'language-focused' development.[3][4] This allowed automatic rewriting of code as expert knowledge of implementation options changed.[5] The company later began developing a platform for improving productivity of software groups.

The company was co-founded by Charles Simonyi and Gregor Kiczales in 2002, and later headed by CEO Eric Anderson. However, Kiczales left the company in 2003.[6] In 2017 it had almost 100 staff.[7] On April 18, 2017, it was acquired by Microsoft,[8][9] with many of its employees joining the Microsoft Office team.

Products and services[edit]

Intentional Software developed the Domain Workbench, a language workbench for building and working with domain-specific languages,[10] and designed custom languages for clients for their particular uses.[11] They also built the Intentional Platform,[12] a platform for group productivity software.

References[edit]

  1. ^ Rosenberg, Scott. "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta". Retrieved 4 September 2017.
  2. ^ Pontin, Jason (2007). "Awaiting the Day When Everyone Writes Software". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2017-09-12.
  3. ^ Fowler, Martin. "Language Workbenches: The Killer-App for Domain Specific Languages?" (PDF).
  4. ^ Rosenan, Boaz (2010). "Designing language-oriented programming languages". Proceedings of the ACM international conference companion on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications companion. OOPSLA '10. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 207–208. doi:10.1145/1869542.1869576. ISBN 9781450302401. S2CID 13841558.
  5. ^ Simonyi, Charles; Christerson, Magnus; Clifford, Shane (2006). "Intentional software". Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications. OOPSLA '06. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 451–464. doi:10.1145/1167473.1167511. ISBN 1595933484. S2CID 10334945.
  6. ^ "Co-Founder Of Intentional Software Has Left The Company". InformationWeek. Retrieved 2020-07-28.
  7. ^ "Charles Simonyi rejoins Microsoft as it buys his startup". The Seattle Times. 2017-04-18. Retrieved 2017-09-12.
  8. ^ Miller, Ron. "Microsoft acquires Intentional Software and brings old friend back into fold - TechCrunch". Retrieved 4 September 2017.
  9. ^ "Charles Simonyi, Founder, Chairman, and CTO -". www.intentional.com. Archived from the original on 2018-08-25. Retrieved 2017-09-12.
  10. ^ "Charles Simonyi reveals production use of Intentional Software @ JAOO". InfoQ. Retrieved 2017-09-12.
  11. ^ "ACORD and Intentional Software Announce Strategic Partnership — ACORD.org Press Releases". Press Releases. Retrieved 2017-09-12.
  12. ^ "Intentional Platform -". www.intentsoft.com. Retrieved 2017-09-12.

External links[edit]