CAD/CAM is widely used to describe and to assist in the manufacture of compex artifacts such as aircraft. Intentional Programming is the extension of CAD/CAM methodologies to software engineering.

Intentions are "development-time" objects that encapsulate all behaviors of programming abstractions in an integrated development environment. Intentional programming is the assemblage of programs from intention instances, just as programming in a high level language is the assemblage of programs from syntactic instances of the fixed set of abstractions of the given language. Intentional programming brings the benefits of objects to a new area: to the programming process itself. We will discuss the wide-ranging effects of intentions on generative programming, domain specific languages, language extension, notations, legacy programs, and software sharing.

SPEAKER BIO
As chief architect at Microsoft Research, Charles Simonyi is responsible for new approaches in programming technology. Simonyi joined Microsoft in 1981 to start the development of microcomputer application programs. He hired and managed teams who developed Microsoft Excel, Multiplan, Word, and other software applications. In 1991, he moved on to Microsoft Research where he focused on Intentional Programming, a new approach to program representation where new abstraction mechanisms can be introduced without invalidating legacy code, so that the development of new programming language features can be greatly accelerated.

Before coming to Microsoft, Simonyi worked at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) from 1972-80, developing Bravo, the first WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor.

Simonyi, born in Budapest, Hungary, holds a bachelor of science degree in engineering mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley, 1972, and a doctorate in computer science from Stanford, 1976. His thesis was "Meta-programming: a Software Production Method." In 1997 he has been elected to be a member of the National Academy of Engineering for "his contributions to the development of widely used desktop productivity software".

Simonyi has endowed chairs for "Public Understanding of Science" at Oxford University - presently held by Prof. Richard Dawkins; for "Theoretical Physics" at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton - held by Prof. Ed Witten; and for "Educational Technology" at Stanford - held by Prof. Eric Roberts.

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