Awaiting the Day When Everyone Writes Software - New York Times

Another Simonyi snapshot. 

Charles Simonyi, the chief executive of Intentional Software, a start-up in Bellevue, Wash., believes that there is another way. He wants to overthrow conventional coding for something he calls “intentional programming,” in which programmers would talk to machines as little as possible. Instead, they would concentrate on capturing the intentions of computer users.

Mr. Simonyi, the former chief architect of Microsoft, is arguably the most successful pure programmer in the world, with a personal fortune that Forbes magazine estimates at $1 billion. There may be richer programmer-billionaires — Bill Gates of Microsoft and Larry Page of Google come to mind — but they became rich by founding and managing technology ventures; Mr. Simonyi rose mainly by writing code.

There's an interesting and tangentially related article about Numenta in the latest issue of Business 2.0, but, annoyingly, it's not on the publication's web site yet. 

Source: Awaiting the Day When Everyone Writes Software - New York Times