Renowned Microsoft Corp. engineer Charles Simonyi, who was behind the early development of Microsoft Word and other key applications, has left the company in order to start his own.
Simonyi, along with Gregor Kiczales, a computer science professor at the University of British Columbia, Tuesday announced the creation of Intentional Software Corp.
Based in Bellevue, Washington, the new company was launched with the goal of releasing software programming tools based on an engineering concept called intentional programming, which Simonyi focused on while working in the research division at Microsoft, according to a company statement.
Intentional programming is aimed at creating a programming environment that lets developers reuse software components and easily manipulate code during the development process, according to the company. The tools could make use of such elements as models or charts to represent the underlying code of an application.
Intentional Software is not alone in the effort to develop a more simple tool for programming and maintaining software. Rational Software Corp. is a pioneer of tools based on UML, or Unified Modeling Language, a graphics-based software development language. Sun Microsystems Inc. engineer James Gosling has also described similar work under way in Sun"s research group through a project known as Jackpot.