New software writes its own code

Charles Simonyi is creating software that writes software…

Business 2.0 writes:

Simonyi’s five-year-old startup, Intentional Software, is making software so smart that you can simply tell it what you want to do. Lay down a few basic parameters, and it will write its own code. No programming skills are necessary.

"Experts [in other fields] can be much more innovative and responsive to their business, and see the resulting software immediately," says Simonyi, speaking from the deck of his yacht, one of the world’s largest.

Humans, arguably, have done a pretty lousy job of writing code. Derailed software projects have shamed plenty of large companies. (See "When Bugs Attack," right.) The National Institute of Standards and Technology says such bugs cost the U.S. economy nearly $60 billion each year.

"The nature of programming is that you make mistakes," says Jonathan Edwards, a research fellow at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. "No one ever gets it right, and people have concluded this is as good as it’s going to get."

What’s Next: Simonyi’s new software writes its own code – Aug. 28, 2007.

Simonyi is not just some hack coming out of nowhere with big claims. He has a hefty resume at Xerox PARC and Microsoft.