Intentional Programming demo (Part 1) - Editor
Why Hacker News recommends it
Commenters cite it as an early example of projectional or intent-based programming tools when discussing alternatives to text-based code.
What it is
A roughly ten-minute demo of Microsoft's Intentional Programming research system, showing its editor and an unusual way of working with code. It is the first of two clips cut from a longer video.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2007 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends spyder · 2014-09 · on “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]
Cites amichail · 2007-02 · on “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 [this video] 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.
Cites amichail · 2007-03 · on “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 [this video]
Cites corysama · 2016-11 · on “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]
Cites DalekBaldwin · 2017-05 · on “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]
Cites calebh · 2018-01 · on “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]
Cites corysama · 2023-08 · on “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.
Cites sweetsocks21 · 2024-02 · on “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.