Charles Simonyi

The Future is Intentional

beginning to understand that simplicity is required for reli;ibility. The big wads of software that we have grown used to might be replaced by small, simple components that do only what they need to do and can be combined together. It’s a move from the Baroque to a Bauhaus style, and one I think we all need to embrace and encourage. Part of this revolution is a trend toward languagebased systems. I t used to be that the language you used to develop a system or component was an accidental property, and everything was written assuming that it needed to talk with things written in other languages. This led to a great deal of complexity and often weakened the connections between systems to the passing of lowest-common-denominator data types. But we are now seeing systems that require a particular language. Because of that, we are able to use the rich type system of the language to describe interactions. This makes the overall system considerably more simple while increasing its expressive power.