[via Scripting News] The New York Times reports that Charles Simonyi is leaving Microsoft to start his own company that hopes to make writing computer programs easier by using a combination of graphic images, charts, and text.

The idea, Mr. Simonyi said, is to make it easier to build and debug complex software programs by moving a step further away from conventional, close-to-the-machine coding ? the painstaking handwork that can be where programmers' good ideas or intentions are lost or left out.

Some of you may not know that Simonyi is also the architect of the Hungarian notation that is used in many Microsoft products. It adds prefixes to identifiers to help programmers understand the identifier more easily. In its most extreme form, it makes code unreadable, so I use a trimmed down version in my own code.

What gets me all fired up is the notion that designing and implementing complex software systems can be made easier by automating the process. Programming is hard work. The hardest part is getting the design right.

How does wrapping the problem up in yet another layer of abstraction make things easier? And how do you debug the code generated by this graphical system?

"His research had its ups and downs at Microsoft, Mr. Simonyi acknowledged. But he is being joined in founding Intentional Software by another leading researcher in software engineering, Gregor Kiczales. Mr. Kiczales, a computer scientist at the University of British Columbia, has had success applying a technology called aspect-oriented programming to make changes automatically in complex software, like sophisticated financial-transaction programs.

Don't hold your breath. By the time they figure out how to make accurate changes in huge code bases like financial tracking systems we'll be old and grey.