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.

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.

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