Good intentions

There's a video about Intentional Software over at MSDN, and it's definitely one of the more brilliant things to have come out in a while. Most of the times, people who best know how a software should function, are not the ones writing it. That is how people who write software for money, make money - they pitch their ability to convert business requirements into "executables". With intentional software, everyone does what they do best.

All the places I've worked at had tools that made it easy for domain experts to give their inputs, since turnaround time is extremely important for business. Even for personal projects, I've toyed with modeling tools and OR mapping frameworks to make my model somewhat independent of the implementation. Never have I seen a tool so comprehensive, though - watching an electrical circuit being modeled as a diagram, along with the impedance and voltages was amazing. This wasn't just the model being abstracted - it was the whole program, editable as text, diagrams or XML, and easily converted into executable code.

Martin Fowler has quite a lot to say about it too, there isn't much I can add to it. Open source junkies like me will look for an open source alternative for this, and will find JetBrains' Meta Programming System. The next few days will be exciting, as I try to evaluate this beast and see whether it fits into any of my current work.