Innovative Software That Writes Itself

According to an article in the now defunct Business 2.0 magazine, Charles Simonyi of Microsoft Word and Excel fame, has begun a startup designed to sell innovative software that writes software. The company is focused on helping organizations reduce the financial impact of software errors (estimated to cost U.S. companies $60 billion a year). What’s next toast that butters itself?

The intention of Intentional Software is to make software development easier, cheaper, better, and less error prone. The easier part comes from increased reusability. The cheaper part comes from the requirement of fewer programmer and testing hours to complete a project. The better part comes from letting the business people make their needs even clearer up front. The software is less error prone as a result of all of these things together and the capturing of best practices from each completed project being fed back into the system to make the starting point for the next project even better than the last.

Henk Kolk, CTO at Capgemini is a believer because of Domain Workbench’s ability to enable businesspeople to express “what they want to do and generate software directly from that.”

But will software developers and business people buy into the value of this innovation, or will skepticism kill it in the womb? What do you think?