Intentional Programming demo (Part 1) - Editor

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2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2007–2024
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14K views · 20 years ago · demo · expert · historical

Part 1 of a demo of Charles Simonyi's Intentional Programming, showing its editor. Programs are stored as structured intentions and projected into different views for reading and editing.

HN returns to it as the early example of projectional editing and multiple views of code, cited whenever new programming tools claim the idea.

“Charles Simonyi's Intentional Software was doing that back in the days of Windows NT”
Tools for thought & programming UX
#intentionalprogramming#charlessimonyi#projectionalediting#codeviews#programmingtools

10 comments from Hacker News

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@spyder2014 · in “New Requests for Startups”
There are some interesting ideas that could help with reading and writing programs: from Bret Victor: link and intentional programming from Charles Simonyi: link ▶ this video
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@amichail2007 · in “Intentional Programming demo (did intentional programming inspire Eclipse?)”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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@sweetsocks212024 · in “Clean your codebase with basic information theory”
Intentional Software was working on a system like this many years ago: ▶ this video Part 2: link You can project your programs into different views and add lots of metadata about the program and use that data in various contexts. Also extends to source control and other use cases. It looked really neat. I'm not sure what happened to it.
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@corysama2023 · in “Predictive Debugging: A Game-Changing Look into the Future”
Charles Simonyi's Intentional Software was doing that back in the days of Windows NT ▶ this video But, they stayed insular and enterprise right up until Microsoft bought them back. We mortals barely got to see or hear anything about it. I heard one podcast interview of a developer there who said they basically represent the code as an s-expression tree with a bunch of metadata on each node.
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@calebh2018 · in “Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language”
This idea has been around for ages. Check out this old video on intentional programming by Microsoft: ▶ this video
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@DalekBaldwin2017 · in “Charles Simonyi on Intentional Software Joining Microsoft”
For the curious: it's difficult to find that particular demo on the web now, but the system didn't look too much different from its earlier incarnation at Microsoft in the '90s: ▶ this video
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@corysama2016 · in “Ask HN: Is the architecture of programming tools historical accident?”
It's a shame the Intentional Software crew have been nearly silent for the a decade or so they've been in business. They've been doing projections-of-ASTs based programming for a very long time. They bragged a lot about it early on and I haven't heard much of anything since. Here are a couple of demo vids from well over 10 years ago: ▶ this video link Here's an interview from 2009 where one of the crew members talks about an annotated S-expression as the core code representation (IIRC, it's been a long time since I listened to it) link
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@amichail2009 · in “Beyond Bing: Applying Intentional Programming to Web Search”
What would happen if we apply intentional programming to web search? Intentional programming is demonstrated in these videos: ▶ this video link Also see: link link For web search the idea would be to open up your search engine so that anyone can submit code for domain specific query entry, search, ranking, and presentation of results. Moreover, such code submissions would compete with each other, with more effective ones rising in popularity in their respective domains. Unlike APIs that are currently available, the submissions made by users here would make up the core feature set of the service.
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@amichail2007 · in “SF Chronicle article about new search startups”
I wonder if it would make sense to make a search engine platform where (more technical) users can submit code for domain specific query entry, search, ranking, and presentation of results. Moreover, such code submissions would compete with each other, with more effective ones rising in popularity in their respective domains. Unlike APIs that are currently available, the submissions made by users here would make up the core feature set of the service. This is sort of like intentional programming, but applied to search: ▶ this video link
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@amichail2007 · in “I'm looking for a partner or two (here are some of my ideas, feel free to add your own here)”
I am interested in seeing what happens when you apply intentional programming to web search: ▶ this video link The idea is to open up your search engine so that anyone can submit code for domain specific query entry, search, ranking, and presentation of results. Moreover, such code submissions would compete with each other, with more effective ones rising in popularity in their respective domains. Unlike APIs that are currently available, the submissions made by users here would make up the core feature set of the service.
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