Charles Simonyi

CHARLES SIMONYI

Born September 1948 in Budapest, Hungary. Worked at Regnecentralen in Copenhagen 1967-68. Left for USA to study at University of California at Berkeley. In 1972 Bachelor of Science degree in engineering mathematics. Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford on 1977. Worked at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center developing Bravo, the first WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. He joined Microsoft in 1981 (when Microsoft had only 40 employees) to start the development of microcomputer application programs. He hired and managed teams who developed Microsoft Excel, Multiplan, Word, and other applications. In 1991, he moved on to Microsoft Research where he focused on Intentional Programming, an "ecology for abstractions" which strives for maximal reuse of components by separating high-level intentions from implementation detail. In 2002 he left Microsoft to form a new company Intentional Software Corporation, a software engineering company dedicated to assisting software developers in capturing the tremendous latent value that is usually lost in the design and development process. Acording to Forbes he is one of the 400 Richest Americans (owns over $600 million).

A Hungarian native, Charles Simonyi is most famous for creating the so-called "Hungarian" naming convention, still used by developers worldwide to create software source code that is easier to read and maintain. According to legend, fellow programmers at Microsoft, on seeing the convoluted, vowel-less variable names produced by his scheme, said, "This might as well be in Greek - or even Hungarian!". They made up the name "Hungarian notation". His invention of the notation dates back to the early seventies, and he used it during his degree work at Berkeley and later when he was working at Xerox PARC. He disliked the way that names in C programs could stand for any kind of variable. This was for ever leading to mistakes, as programmers tried to manipulate variables in ways that their type prohibited, and which they would never had done if they remembered what sort they were. “If only,” he thought, “the names of the variables themselves gave useful information about their type ...”. And so the idea of Hungarian notation was born, in which each variable is prefixed by lower-case letters indicating useful things about it. "Naming conventions are supposed to make the code more readable," he said in a 1986 interview. "The joke is that the program looks so unreadable [when using my naming convention], it might as well have been written in Hungarian. But it's a set of conventions that controls the naming of all quantities in the program. 'Hungarian' is a complete jumble to the uninitiated, and that's the joke." o Interview of Charles Simonyi - http://shamit.virtualave.net/charles_simonyi.htm ??? o Charles Simonyi: Program Identifier Naming Conventions (Hungarian Naming Convention) (198? 10 pages). http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en- us/dnvsgen/html/hunganotat.asp o Charles Simonyi and Martin Heller: The Hungarian Revolution. BYTE august 1991. o Charles Simonyi: The Death Of Computer Languages, The Birth Of Intentional Programming (1995 ca. 25 pages) http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?msr_tr_id=MSR-TR-95-52 o "Intentional Programming" A Talk With Charles Simonyi (The New York Times 12 Nov 1990) http://www.edge.org/digerati/simonyi/simonyi_p1.html o Intentional Software Corporation www.intentsoft.com