Removing Software Complexity

t482 writes "Charles Simonyi (ex Xerox Parc & Microsoft ) says that Software "has become a field where we focus on incremental improvements in processes. That course is futile, because it can never solve the problem of human imperfection." Even as software collapses under the weight of its own complexity, we've barely begun to exploit its potential to solve problems. The challenge, Simonyi believes, is to find a way to write programs that both programmers and users can actually read and comprehend. Simonyi's solution? To create programming tools that are so simple and powerful that the software nearly writes itself. "Software should be as easy to edit as a PowerPoint presentation," Simonyi asserts."

Re:m_lpstrnzCharlesSimonyi

[GCP]

I don't know who you are, but the chance that you're qualified to call Simonyi "stupid" is statistically insignificant.

Hungarian notation is a means for overcoming a critical flaw in the C language: the lack of type safety. There are about a million different "abstractions" that look to your C compiler like just a sequence of bytes. C code collects bugs like a porch light every time you try to evolve your code by changing abstractions. Hungarian notation, macros, other coding conventions, special "lint" tools, etc., are pretty much all designed to reduce the problems caused by the poor design of C itself.

Simonyi contributed a workaround that's useful to those who know when and how much to use it.

Re:COBOL

[anomalous cohort]

Another technology along these lines was CASE (Computer Aided Software Engingeering) which went up in a ball of hype since the complexity of the tools could not keep up with the demands of the user base or the promises of the sales team.

That will always be the case. Simonyi's marketing position seems to be trying for sympatico with CTO's whose TCO on their ERP solutions are, shall we say, unmanageble. Like the late Michael Dertouzos, Simonyi is attempting the "I'm mad as hell and I can't take it anymore" style of vision.

All well and good and I wish him success in this venture but he is not the first to market his cool tool as the next killer app and I'm sure that he won't be the last.

As far as managing software complexity, what was that old credo about each tool doing one thing and doing it well?

Re:VB/Access/Cobol/Simonyi: No silver bullet!

[dollargonzo]

as long as functional programming languages are considered to be declarative (at least according to foldoc [ic.ac.uk]) then there are plenty of declarative programming languages. arguably, functional languages are not completely declarative, but they aim high and do a much better job of defining the problem.