Intentional Software


Intentional Software is a software company that designed tools and platforms that follow the principles of intentional programming 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 include language workbenches, 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 and Gregor Kiczales in 2002, and later headed by CEO Eric Anderson. Kiczales would however leave the company in 2003. In 2017 it had almost 100 staff. On April 18, 2017, it was acquired by Microsoft, with many of its employees joining the Microsoft Office team.

Products and services

Intentional Software developed the Domain Workbench, a language workbench 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.