What exactly is Intentional Programming

Question

On my reading spree, I stumbled upon something called Intentional Programming. I understood it somewhat, but I not fully. If anyone can explain it in better detail, please do. Is it being used in any real application?

Answer 1

It appears to be a method of programming that allows the programmer to expand what is actually in the language to more closely follow their original intent, rather than forcing the programmers intent into the constrained syntax of the language.

It explicitly mentions LISP as a language that supports this, so I'd suggest you read up on this great language :) LISP Macros are exactly what are described in the article, allowing you to indefinitely expand the language to cover almost anything you would care to express. (A fairly common outcome of large LISP systems is that you end up with a domain specific language that is very good for writing specific applications, i.e. writing a word processor ends up with a word processor specific language).

For your last part, yes LISP (and thus Intentional Programming) is used in some projects. Paul Graham is a great proponent of LISP, and other examples of it include the original Crash Bandicoot (a game object creation system was created in LISP for this, including a LISP PlayStation compiler)

Answer 2

It's where you intend to program, you don't just accidently do it. ;)

Answer 3

You got me started on this one...
Looks like C. Simonyi wanted to step to the next level of abstraction from High level languages. Reduce the dependency of customers on developers to make every change.. in code (cryptic for people not in development). So he invents this new product called IP, which has a WYSIWYG type GUI editor to create a domain specific model. (i.e. IP has a GUI to create the building blocks for your app.. LISP allowed you to create the meta/building blocks but not in a way that domain experts could easily do it.)
Like the models in UML, the promise is that you can auto-generate the corresponding source code at the "push of a button". So the domain experts can tweak the model in the future and press the Bake button to deliver the next version of the app. It seems to utilise DSLs however with the added benefit that multiple user-created DSLs can talk with each other via a built-in IP mechanism... which means the finance model and sales model can interact and reuse blocks as needed. As with DSLs, you get the benefit of code that conveys developer intent rather than appeases implementation language constraints.

The idea being to give greater control to the BA and domain experts who actually know what's needed...

Update: Real world use looks like 'not yet'.. although Simonyi believes 'absolutely in the long term'.
Short Story: MS squished IP in favor of .Net framework, Simonyi left MS and formed his own company 'Intentional Software'.. with the contract that he could use the IP ideas but he would have to rewrite his working proto from the ground up.. (that should slow him down). It's still Work-In-Progress I think.. and being written in C# (to boot)

Sources:

• Anything you can do, I can do meta Part 1
• Anything you can do, I can do meta Part 2

To think till yesterday.. I didn't know a thing about this. Investigative reporter signing off. Going back to day job :)

Answer 4

It's the opposite of what happens when I come home at 2am after a pub crawl and fire up the laptop "just to check my email real quick, hon."

Then, the next day, when I peel open one eye and find my way to the bathroom at the crack of noon, I start brushing my teeth and realize, toothpaste dribbling out of my mouth, that last night I made 4 SVN commits, closed 3 bugs, and figured out how to solve the starvation problem on our distributed locking protocol. And I have no idea how the hell any of it works, anymore.

Or maybe it's what workmad3 said.

Answer 5

Seems to me like yet another fad of software engineering. We've seen thousands of them already: meta programming, generative programming, visual programming, and so on. For a short time they get very fashionable, people use it everywhere, and then they invariably go back to old ways of creating software.

Why? Frederick Brooks has already answered this question over 20 years ago: there's No Single Silver Bullet to kill the werewolf...