Intentional programming

In computer programming, Intentional Programming is a programming paradigm developed by Charles Simonyi that encodes in software source code the precise intention which programmers (or users) have in mind when conceiving their work. By using the appropriate level of abstraction at which the programmer is thinking, creating and maintaining computer programs become easier. By separating the concerns for intentions and how they are being operated upon, the software becomes more modular and allows for more reusable software code. In computer programming, Intentional Programming is a programming paradigm developed by Charles Simonyi that encodes in software source code the precise intention which programmers (or users) have in mind when conceiving their work. By using the appropriate level of abstraction at which the programmer is thinking, creating and maintaining computer programs become easier. By separating the concerns for intentions and how they are being operated upon, the software becomes more modular and allows for more reusable software code. Intentional Programming was developed by former Microsoft chief architect Charles Simonyi, who led a team in Microsoft Research, which developed the paradigm and built an integrated development environment (IDE) called IP (for Intentional Programming) that demonstrated the paradigm. Microsoft decided not to productize the Intentional Programming paradigm, as in the early 2000s Microsoft was rolling out C# and .NET to counter Java adoption. Charles Simonyi decided, with approval of Microsoft, to take his idea out from Microsoft and commercialize it himself. He founded the company Intentional Software to pursue this. Microsoft licensed the Intentional Programming patents Simonyi had acquired while at Microsoft, but no source code, to Intentional Software. An overview of Intentional Programming as it was developed at Microsoft Research is given in Chapter 11 of the book Generative Programming: Methods, Tools, and Applications. As envisioned by Simonyi, developing a new application via the Intentional Programming paradigm proceeds as follows. A programmer builds a WYSIWYG-like environment supporting the schema and notation of business knowledge for a given problem domain (such as productivity applications or life insurance). Users then use this environment to capture their intentions, which are recorded at high level of abstraction. The environment can operate on these intentions and assist the user to create semantically richer documents that can be processed and executed, similar to a spreadsheet. The recorded knowledge is executed by an evaluator or is compiled to generate the final program. Successive changes are done at the WYSIWYG level only. As opposed to word processors, spreadsheets or presentation software, an Intentional environment has more support for structure and semantics of the intentions to be expressed, and can create interactive documents that capture more richly what the user is trying to accomplish. A special case is when the content is program code, and the environment becomes an intelligent IDE. Key to the benefits of Intentional Programming is that domain code which capture the intentions are not stored in source code text files, but in a tree-based storage (could be binary or XML). Tight integration of the environment with the storage format brings some of the nicer features of database normalization to source code. Redundancy is eliminated by giving each definition a unique identity, and storing the name of variables and operators in exactly one place. This makes it easier to intrinsically distinguish declarations from references, and the environment can show them differently. Whitespace in a program is also not stored as part of the source code, and each programmer working on a project can choose an indentation display of the source. More radical visualizations include showing statement lists as nested boxes, editing conditional expressions as logic gates, or re-rendering names in Chinese. The system uses a normalized language for popular languages like C++ and Java, while letting users of the environment mix and match these with ideas from Eiffel and other languages. Often mentioned in the same context as language-oriented programming via domain-specific languages, and aspect-oriented programming, IP purports to provide some breakthroughs in generative programming. These techniques allow developers to extend the language environment to capture domain-specific constructs without investing in writing a full compiler and editor for any new languages. A Java program that writes out the numbers from 1 to 10, using a curly bracket syntax, might look like this: The code above contains a common construct of most programming languages, the bounded loop, in this case represented by the for construct. The code, when compiled, linked and run, will loop 10 times, incrementing the value of i each time after printing it out.