[Paleopsych] EDGE Digerati: The WYSIWYG - Charles Simonyi

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EDGE Digerati: The WYSIWYG - Charles Simonyi
http://www.edge.org/digerati/simonyi/simonyi_p1.html et seq.
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"INTENTIONAL PROGRAMMING" A Talk With Charles Simonyi
("The WYSIWYG")

Charles Simonyi Photo

Introduction by
John Brockman

During the 1970s at Xerox PARC, Charles Simonyi led a team of programmers 
in the development of Bravo, the first WYSIWYG (what you see is what you 
get) word-processing editor. Bravo was a fundamental departure from the 
way information was previously displayed and organized and it was part of 
PARC's contribution that changed the face of computing and ultimately led 
to personal computing.

Simonyi, born in Budapest, Hungary, holds a bachelor of science degree
in engineering mathematics from the University of California at
Berkeley and a doctorate in computer science from Stanford University.
He worked for the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center from 1972-80 and
joined Microsoft in 1981 to start the development of microcomputer
application programs. He hired and managed teams who developed
Microsoft Multiplan, Word, Excel, and other applications. In 1991, he
moved to Microsoft Research where he has been focusing on Intentional
Programming. He is generally thought of as one of the most talented
programmers at Microsoft.

Dr. Simonyi, whose long career has made him independently wealthy, has
endowed two chairs: the Charles Simonyi Professorship For The
Understanding Of Science at Oxford University which is held by the
evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins; and the Charles Simonyi
Professorship in Theoretical Physics at the Institute for Advanced
Study.

John Markoff, writing in The New York Times (12 Nov 1990), relates the
following anecdote: "He enjoys taking visitors to the machine shop in
the basement of his new home, complete with lathe and drill press. 'In
Hungary,' he said, 'they told us that the workers would never own the
means of production.'"

Charles Simonyi is "The WYSIWYG."

-JB

Charles Simonyi talks with John Brockman...

http://www.edge.org/digerati/simonyi/simonyi_p2.html

JB: What's new, Charles?

SIMONYI: I have been working on what we call "intentional
programming." It's very exciting. It has to do with professional
programming, so it's kind of hard to get into the details. It also
relates to the work of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in a
fairly direct way. We are trying to create an ecology of abstractions.
Abstraction is really the most powerful tool that we have in thinking
about problems. An abstraction is a single thing, yet if it is a good
one, it can have many applications, even an infinite number of them.
So an abstraction may be looked at from one side as a compression of
many instances into one generality or from the other side as a special
purpose power tool that yields the solution for many problems. If one
could attach a dollar sign to this power, the economies would be
amazing: rivaling that of chips or application software itself.

Programming languages are really just vehicles to supply abstractions
to programmers. People think of programming languages as being good or
bad for a given purpose, but they are really criticizing the
abstractions that a language embodies. The progress in programming
languages has been incredibly slow because new programming languages
are difficult to create and even more difficult to get adopted. When
you have a new programming language, the users have to rewrite their
legacy code and change their skills to accommodate the language. So,
basically, new programming languages can come about only when there is
an independent revolution that justifies the waste of the legacy, such
as Unix which gave rise to C, or the Web which gave rise to Java. Yet
it's not the languages that are of value, but only the abstractions
that the languages carry.

It's very much like Dawkins' idea that it's the genes, not the
individuals, that are important in evolution. And, in fact, what's
being reproduced are the genes, not individuals. Otherwise, how would
we have worker bees and so on. We are doing the same thing; it's
abstractions that matter, not languages. It's just that we don't think
of abstractions without languages, because languages used to be the
only carriers for abstractions. But if you could create an ecology in
which an abstraction could survive independent of everything else,
then you would see a much more rapid evolution for abstractions, and
you would witness the evolution of much more capable abstractions.

To enable the ecology, all you have to do is make the abstractions
completely self-describing, so that an abstraction will carry all of
its description, both of how it looks and of what it does. It's called
intentional programming because the abstractions really represent the
programmers' original computational intent. And that's what the
important invariant is, everything else of how something looks or how
something is implemented, these are things that should evolve and
should be improved so they can change. What you want to maintain
invariantly is the computational intent as separated from
implementation detail.

JB: It sounds biological in nature.

SIMONYI: Yes, we are using a lot of biological metaphors. We call our
transformations, for example, enzymes. It's just that biology, and all
the sciences of complexity, are making big forward strides, and it's
just a matter of using as many of the metaphors as one can.

JB: But it is still a programming language, isn't it??

SIMONYI: Absolutely not. Intentional Programming relates to a
Programming Language as a powerset relates to a set. It is strictly
greater, there cannot be any isomorphism between the two. IP programs
are encoded in a tree-like data structure where each node also has a
graph-like pointer to the definition of the intention the node is an
instance of. Every node can have arbitrary nodes underneath it, that
is nodes can be parameterized arbitrarily. The semantics of intentions
are described by the tree transformations which convert the instances
into primitive intentions from which native or interpreted code can be
generated by standard means. The looks of intentions are also defined
by arbitrary computation which serves no purpose other than to ease
interaction with the programmer. So names and looks what used to be
called "syntax" will have no effect on the computation and may be
changed arbitrarily as programming styles and programmers' needs
evolve. Knuth's dream of "literate programming" will become practical
and I expect a great deal of visual richness to also emerge in the
programs.

JB: Isn't this just another meteor that wipes out legacy to make room
for evolution?

SIMONYI: Luckily that is not the case. Intentions can be defined for
all features of all legacy languages, so legacy code can be imported
into IP without loss of information or functionality. Once in IP, the
process of incremental, continuous improvement can begin and the
lifetime of the legacy code will be limited only by its usefulness,
not by the means used to encode it.

JB: Do you foresee structural changes in the industry as a result of
this?

SIMONYI: It will be very exciting. The personal computer industry has
enabled evolution in the platforms. Out of the Cambrian Explosion of
the early eighties there emerged a few dominant architectures, the
Windows family being the most popular of them. There is incredible
variety in terms of peripherals, applications, networking, form
factors, performances all the result of evolution. I foresee a similar
progression in the realm of abstractions. Once everybody with a $5K
machine and good programming skills is empowered to create and publish
abstractions for which any one of the tens of millions of programmers
will be potential customers, there will be a tremendous explosion of
creativity. Many of the early new abstractions will be addressing the
same easily accessible niches, such as collections and maps of course,
so a shakeout will be inevitable. Then the creative energies will be
channeled to the myriad domains: software sharing, user interfaces,
graphics, accounting, animal husbandry, whatever. Each of these areas
will benefit from domain-specific abstractions and optimizations which
in turn will improve the quantity and quality of application software
in those domains. There will be more shareable software artifacts,
thanks to IP's ability to parameterize any abstraction further with
any kinds of parameters.

The "first law" of intentional programming says: For every abstraction
one should be able to define an equal and opposite "concretion". So
repeated abstraction or parameterization need no longer create "Turing
tarpits" where everything eventually grinds to a halt due to the
overhead introduced by the layers. In IP, the enzymes associated by
the abstractions can optimize out the overhead, based on the enzymes'
domain specific knowledge. The overhead associated with abstraction
has always been the bane of the very-high-level languages in the past.

There will be markets for flexible artifacts, abstractions in all
domains, and different implementations for those abstractions. These
in turn will improve tremendously the quality and availability of
application software.

Once one looks at abstraction as a commodity, the standard rules of
business can be applied. For example, one should be able to invest in
the manufacturing process in order to make the product more
competitive. Or in the software arena one should be able to elaborate
the definition of an abstraction in order make its application more
effective: simpler, faster, more flexible. Conventional programming
languages completely ignored this elementary rule: declarations and
references were all designed with the same high-falutin principles in
mind: orthogonality, cleanliness, what have you. It's as if we used
the same standards, materials, and budgets for the factory and the
retail store, or for the machine tools and for the product. Nobody in
business would behave in such an idiotic fashion. In IP one can
associate an arbitrary computation with any definition, so the
opportunities for making investments in definitions are limitless.
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http://www.edge.org/digerati/simonyi/simonyi_p3.html

JB: I've been hearing your name since the mid-seventies. It seems like
you've been a player in almost every epic of personal computing.

SIMONYI: I've been incredibly lucky, in a strange way. In the U.S.,
computers that operated with vacuum tubes were obsolete in the late
50's, whereas in Hungary, where I grew up, they were in use. It was a
time-warp. Also, I started working with computers at a young age. When
the personal computer revolution came about much later, the people in
the U.S. that had worked with tube computers were long retired, if not
dead, while I was really in the prime of my career. So starting very
young and starting in a time-warp gave me this double benefit that I
think very few people had. It was very unusual, at least in Hungary,
to start that young, but if you look at it today, you know that
computer programming is not difficult. Or rather, the kind of computer
programming that was done in the 60's is really child's play. It's
just that at that time that secret was well hidden, so people were
very worried about letting me close to very expensive machines. But I
had a certain pull through my dad, who was a professor of electrical
engineering, and I made myself useful by working for free, which was
also a kind of an unknown notion, but I had this intuitive idea of
looking at it as an investment.

This was in Hungary, in 1965, when I was 16 years old. I learned a lot
then. In a period of three years I traversed three generations of
computers: the first generation in Hungary, then a year and a half in
Denmark on a very typical second generation machine in Copenhagen.
Then I proceeded to Berkeley where I wound up in a computer center on
a CDC 6400, which was a fantastic third generation machine.

JB: How did you get out of Hungary?

SIMONYI: I went to a lot of subterfuge to get out, to be sure. I got
out legally; but it was illegal not to return. The way I got out was
that I finished high school one year before it was expected, which was
a unique feat at the time, in terms of actually getting permission and
go through with it. People there were living in a very fearful and
lock-step way, and just to do something unusual was a big deal. So
when I got out of high school I was 17, underage, so the military
couldn't touch me. I also secured an invitation to work at
Regnecentralen in Copenhagen, where one of the first Algol compilers
was developed. At that time university people had deferments, so the
military were in a quandary. If I were to go to university in Hungary,
then I would have been completely out of their reach. Whereas if I had
spent the year by going to this Danish institute, for example, then
they could catch me on the rebound. So they took the lesser of two
evils, and they let me out.

JB: Did your father leave with you?

SIMONYI: No, I left alone. He had many political problems and later
suffered because of my defection, but we had already taken that into
consideration. It worked out for the best in the end, and he would
have been very unhappy if I had been on his side having the same
problems as he did. He didn't want to leave his country for many
reasons, and I think he was egging me on to leave. I mean, now I can
say freely that he was encouraging me to get out.

JB: What happened at Berkeley?

SIMONYI: I got there when I was 18, and I was kind of a starving
student. Basically, I had a lot of problems with the immigration
people, because nobody had been shooting at me at the Hungarian
border. I was just a normal student, except a student whose passport
seemed to expire every minute. Though I had plenty of offers to be a
programmer, they were pretty strict about taking up employment, which
I thought was very strange in the land of the free. Also, you couldn't
get scholarships as a foreign student, so I was pretty much living
without visible means of support.

I worked for the Computer Center first and met Butler Lampson and did
some jobs for him. He and some other professors started a company
called Berkeley Computer Corporation, and they invited me to work for
them, and that's when I first received a stock option. It wasn't worth
anything in the end, but it's a funny story I haven't told before.

Sometimes I was an outstanding student and sometimes I was a terrible
student, depending on if I had money or if I had to work or whatever.
Also, I had no incentive to get good grades; I just wanted to get an
education. I was completely on my own; I paid for it myself; I viewed
myself as the customer, and a grade was just some stupid rule that the
university had. So I optimized my grades just so they won't throw me
out. Anyway, the Dean talked to me and said, well, Mr. Simonyi, you
were doing so well and are now doing so poorly; what's the reason? Can
we help you? You can share anything with us, tell us what it is. Is it
drugs, is it grass, acid, or mescaline? I smiled at him and said, I
think it's a stock option. He said, well in that case we can't help
you.

Berkeley Computer was really an offshoot of Project Genie, which was
funded by ARPA, and Bob Taylor was doing the funding. When Berkeley
Computer went bankrupt, the core people were hired by Bob Taylor who
was working for Xerox by then. This is how I got into Xerox PARC. I
still didn't have my Bachelors degree. With all this skimming the
bottom of the expulsion curve, it took me five years to get the
degree.

At PARC I had a number of different projects. Then the Alto came into
being the first personal computer and we had this fantastic capability
that was so evident. The most interesting thing: when you see a
capability that kind of blows you away, and you know that this is
going to be the biggest thing, but then some people don't see it. So
it's not like Alto was the only project at PARC; it was just one of a
number of similar projects that was fighting for resources. A resource
is more than just dollars, it's all forms of attention, attention of
the key people and so on.

One day I saw some pieces of paper on Butler's desk, and I asked him
what it was, and he said, Oh, it's a sketch for a text editor, we need
that for the Alto, and I said, well, can I take a look at them? He
said yes, there's nobody working on it. So I took it and decided to
make it happen, because it looked very sweet.

We had to create, again, a subterfuge to make it happen. I had to do
some experiments on programmer productivity, for my Ph.D. thesis. The
first experiment was called Alpha, the second experiment was Bravo.
That's how the first WYSIWYG editor was called Bravo, and it was
funded, in a way, as an experiment for part of my thesis.

My thesis was not about WYSIWYG. The thesis had some philosophical
parts and some measurement parts. The measurement parts are pretty
useless, the philosophical part was quite good, and it served us well
later in the early days of Microsoft. It had to do with organizing
teams, looking at projects, naming conventions and evolving
techniques.

Meanwhile, of course, WYSIWYG was born. Once the Bravo editor and the
other component of the "office of the future" were operational, it
created a fair amount of attention, and a lot of VIPs came to look at
what PARC was coming up with. The name WYSIWYG came about during a
visit from Citibank representatives. We had a demo showing how we
could display a memo with nice fonts, and specifically the Xerox logo
in its specific Xerox font, on screen, and then send it through the
Ethernet and print it out on the laser printer. So we printed what we
had created on the screen onto transparent slide stock. Part of the
demo was to push the button to print and then we held the printed
version up, in front of the screen, so you could see through the
transparent stock that the two were identical. Actually they weren't
exactly identical, but they were close enough. It was pretty
impressive.

One of these visitors said, "I see, what you see is what you get."
Which was of course, you must remember, the Flip Wilson tag-line from
Laugh-In, which was a big TV hit at the time. I think he was doing a
female impersonation. What you see is what you get. Well, that's the
first time I heard it used around the system, which was the first
incorporation of that idea, so somehow the term WYSIWYG must have
spread from that event.
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http://www.edge.org/digerati/simonyi/simonyi_p4.html

JB: How did developing the WYSIWYG word processor lead you to
Microsoft. Or, rather, was Microsoft then in existence?

SIMONYI: Microsoft might well have been founded on the very day we
gave that demo to Citibank in 1975.

At that time we already had a Mac, with a bigger screen than Mac, with
a mouse and so on. The Alto was a very, very serious machine. It cost
fifty thousand bucks; the printer cost two hundred thousand bucks, in
1975 dollars. Gosh, I remember thinking that maybe one day the
drugstore at the corner might have one of those machines, and then it
might be shared by the whole block, or a whole area in a city. Now I
have several of them at home.

Microsoft began at that time by doing Microsoft Basic. I started to
hear about microcomputers in E78, E79, and it sounded like a kids toy.
I recall that Larry Tesler at PARC had a Commodore 64 in his office,
and we sometimes went there to smile at it. I certainly never took it
seriously.

Eventually I started to become deeply unhappy because Xerox seemed to
be treating these ideas in an incompetent fashion. My fear was that I
would be missing out because I was allied with Xerox, and that the
world would be missing out because they were not going to get what was
possible. It wasn't just the Xerox marketing or management
organization, but also the technical organizations, that share a lot
of the blame if it should be called blame. Perhaps we should just
think of it as evolution in action.

The failure of Xerox saved me from a fate worse than death, which
would have been not sharing in the success. If Xerox had been
successful, I would have gotten a thousand dollar bonus, and that
would have been it. And I would have felt a little bit dumb.

But I didn't see the future until I saw Visicalc running on an Apple
II. That was a capability that we didn't have. I thought Xerox
suffered from a disease we call "biggerism," which is the
bigger-the-better type of engineering mentality. And it always
escalates and compounds, and it results in very complicated and very
expensive machines, which is very, very risky, because it's very
difficult to change or to tune to the market, or even discover what
the market wants.

I saw this nimble machine, the Apple II, providing both some
functionality which we at Xerox did not possess, and also having an
incredible biological advantage.

JB: Then what?

SIMONYI: I met Bill Gates, and I clicked with him right away, very
quickly in a very intense way. He was still very, very young, in his
early 20's. This was in November of 1980. But the scope of his vision
was extraordinary for the time, including his ideas about the
graphical user interface. We had a discussion, and I came back a
couple of weeks later with a summary of the discussion. Bill saw
Microsoft becoming the leading producer of microcomputer software,
worldwide. We wanted a worldwide, international market, and to be a
leading producer with a full offering of operating systems,
applications, languages, and consumer products.

It was easy for me to believe in the importance of applications and
graphical user interface because of my experience at Xerox. It was
amazing to see it coming from Bill with an equal intensity, when he
hadn't seen all that stuff, certainly not with the same intimacy as I
had. Furthermore, I realized that he actually had the wherewithal to
deliver it. It was interesting to look at a company like Xerox, with a
hundred thousand people and billions of dollars, and realize that the
success of your project depends on having the right two people that
you want to hire, who may not fit into the corporate structure. And
then you realize that this single guy can hire anybody he wants to!
Bill just said, hire two people, or hire five people. What do you
need? Do you need rooms? Do you need chairs? Yeah! We can do that.
Computers? Yes. You need this, you need that. Sure. We were talking
about only a few hundred thousand dollars which could make a
difference, we weren't talking about a billion.

Bill did spend a lot of money on one thing: a Xerox Star. We got one
of these biggered, enormous, expensive machines, but it had the germ
of the right idea in it. And we just wanted everybody in the
organization to get used to the desktop and to the mouse and to
pointing and to what's possible. And if it's not perfect, that's fine.
We didn't want to use operationally; we used it for education of the
people.

I described myself in an interview as the messenger RNA of the Parc
virus. I never thought the journalist would use it, because at the
time nobody was talking about viruses, about DNA, let alone RNA, let
alone messenger RNA, let alone getting the metaphor. But it was used.

It was the biggest thing in my life, certainly, joining Microsoft and
getting involved in the tremendous energy of those years. Probably one
of the most important things that we did was the hiring. That's one of
the enabling factors of growth, and I think we did a super job in
hiring. Many those people are still with us, and many of them are in
very high positions in the company. But, more than for any of our
competitors, they formed a very responsive, very efficient programming
organization.

That was key, because we did have problems. In applications, we had to
be able to do spreadsheets, we had to do word processing, we had to do
the databases. It was a no-brainer to know that. We did a fairly good
job in spreadsheets. We were competing very effectively against
Visicalc using a strategy that is very much like Java today; it was a
platform independent, interpretive, bytecoded system, that enabled us
at one point to run on 100 different platforms, so we could fund the
international organization and get acquainted with localization
problems, and all those things. Actually, Multiplan, our spreadsheet,
remained very popular in Europe, for much longer than in the States.
What happened in the States was that Lotus 1-2-3, wiped us out. So
that was kind of difficult, but it was our fault. We were betting on
the wrong horse the mixed market with a variety of systems, instead of
the right horse, which happened to be also ourselves, namely MS-DOS.
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http://www.edge.org/digerati/simonyi/simonyi_p5.html

JB: The software war du jour.

SIMONYI: Out of this debacle came Excel later on. I think that
competition is very important. It obviously creates again, comes from
biology much better results. If you look at evolution, much of
evolution is not in response to the environment, it's response to
other flora and fauna in the environment. So we need that, and it's
sad when the opponent doesn't put up a good fight.

You want to have competitors who really put up a really great fight,
and who have incredibly great ideas, and then you improve your ideas.
It's like when somebody runs the four minute mile. Once people see
that it can be done, then they will be able to do the same thing. And
so the four minute mile run isn't copied by the next competitor, he
achieves it through competition.

But every once in a while our competitors do completely crazy things
and they collapse by their own craziness and due to lack of hardcore
and disciplined technical evaluation of what they are doing. I mean,
hype is one thing, but believing your own hype is unforgivable.

JB: What are you referring to?

SIMONYI: The NC, for example. I think that the people around the NC
started with some valid concerns. There is a price concern, which is
not that great, but it is there. Obviously, if something is $900 it's
better than if it's $1200. Certainly there are valid concerns in terms
of cost of ownership, the problem of administration, and the issue of
updating of software in a network. The boot time is a valid concern.
But these concerns can be solved within the existing framework
relatively easily. I mean it's not rocket science, it's a matter of
attention, it's a matter of time; they will be solved.

The NC attempts create a whole new paradigm, where the user will be
faced with a whole new set of tradeoffs but where these problems are
allegedly solved. Of course who knows, because it does not exist yet,
but it's plausible that the start-up time will be solved, or if
there's no local state, that the administration problem is solved.
It's plausible. It's not a hundred percent, because even then there
have to be multiple servers, and when you update something it has to
go to multiple servers.

So it's not like there will be one server machine in the world and all
you have to do is change that machine and all the networked computers
are suddenly up-to-date. No. In some organization there will be 20
servers, and so the updates have to go to all the 20 servers, and so
on so forth. And when you are talking about computers there is no real
difference between 20 servers or 200 work stations, both of them
involve communications, both of them involve synchronization, both of
them involve data distribution yeah, one of them involves a few more
cycles, but cycles are the cheapest things in the world, they are like
dirt, they cost ten to the minus ten cents per. You can't pretend that
the problems will be only solved by creating this new architecture,
and that the other tradeoffs (things like you don't have privacy or
flexibility to run the program you need or that you can't exchange
media or can't take a diskette home or can't install the nice new
voice card) will be accepted without a word by the customer.

And then there are the speeches by Scott McNealy, where he says that
the office computers, by golly, really belong to the companies so they
should be able to do whatever they want. This is strictly speaking
true, but doesn't he see how irrelevant it is, or how annoying it
might be to the person who's working with that computer. And I guess
they could get into a shouting match, and the office worker would say
well, in that case I'm not going to take any work home, or in that
case why don't we have a punch clock and punch in and out, and lose
all the flexibility and all the innovation that people have offered in
the past. It's crazy to try to make such a radical investment on the
basis of such dubious tradeoffs. I'm sorry, but the claimed benefits
are perfectly obtainable within the existing Windows framework and
will be available in the existing framework, at which point the NC
companies will be left with nothing. Zero. Zip. Which will be very
sad. And meanwhile they will have made a considerable investment. And
then we'll be blamed for wiping them out or something.