Intentional Software was a software company that designed tools and platforms that followed the principles of

intentional programming In computer programming, Intentional Programming is a programming paradigm developed by Charles Simonyi that encodes in software source code the precise ''intention'' which programmers (or users) have in mind when conceiving their work. By using ...

in which programmers focus on capturing the intent of users and designers, and spend as little time as possible interacting with machines and compilers. Its tools included

language workbench A language workbench is a tool or set of tools that enables software development in the language-oriented programming software development paradigm. A language workbench will typically include tools to support the definition, reuse and composition o ...

es, tools that separated software function from implementation, and allowed 'language-focused' development. This allowed automatic rewriting of code as expert knowledge of implementation options changed. The company later began developing a platform for improving productivity of software groups. The company was co-founded by

Charles Simonyi Charles Simonyi (; hu, Simonyi Károly, ; born September 10, 1948) is a Hungarian-American software architect. He started and led Microsoft's applications group, where he built the first versions of Microsoft Office. He co-founded and led In ...

and

Gregor Kiczales Gregor Kiczales is an American computer scientist. He is currently a full time professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is best known for developing the concept of aspect-orient ...

in 2002, and later headed by CEO Eric Anderson. However, Kiczales left the company in 2003. In 2017 it had almost 100 staff. On April 18, 2017, it was acquired by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

, with many of its employees joining the Microsoft Office team.

Products and services

Intentional Software developed the Domain Workbench, a

for building and working with domain-specific languages, and designed custom languages for clients for their particular uses. They also built the Intentional Platform, a platform for group

productivity software Productivity software (also called personal productivity software or office productivity software) is application software used for producing information (such as documents, presentations, worksheets, databases, charts, graphs, digital paintings, ...

References

External links

Intentional Software
website

Software companies based in Washington (state) Microsoft acquisitions 2017 mergers and acquisitions Privately held companies based in Washington (state) Software companies established in 2002 Companies based in Bellevue, Washington Software companies of the United States {{US-software-company-stub 2002 establishments in the United States 2002 establishments in Washington (state) Companies established in 2002