Charles Simonyi isn't your typical computer scientist. He's an aficionado of Jaguars and jets. A lifelong bachelor at 54, he lives in a 20,500-square-foot, high-tech house near Seattle and frequently makes magazines' richest-people lists. He's pals with Martha Stewart, worked at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in its heyday, and joined Microsoft when it had 40 employees. In his early days in the States, the Hungarian immigrant would show up for nighttime bug-fixing sessions in a black "debugging suit"--a net shirt and skin-tight, translucent pants.

"Charles is Charles," says Chuck Thacker, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft who's worked with Simonyi since 1968.

Bill Gates once called Simonyi "one of the great programmers of all time." He invented Microsoft Word and Excel, and before that PARC's pioneering Bravo word processor. As long as anyone can remember, he's been trying to close the gap between programmers' design intentions and the actual software code. Make code look like its design, he reasons, and programming becomes more accessible and quality goes up.

	ON ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Simonyi called himself the 'messenger RNA of the PARC virus' when he joined Microsoft in 1981

In September, Simonyi left Microsoft after 21 years to start his own company, Intentional Software Corp., to do just that. Funded with Simonyi's personal fortune, Intentional employs programmers in Hungary and Bellevue, Wash. If Intentional's goal sounds esoteric, well, so was the idea of personal computers once.

Simonyi's intentional-programming tools, still under construction, transform code to make it more comprehensible to users. One view of a business system might show mathematical formulas that appeal to engineers. Click another view, and the underlying code shows up. That could make it easier for developers to turn business users' feedback into functioning systems. "The most carefully and expensively prepared Six Sigma Java source [code] isn't up to the expressive standards of even the poorest of everyday Web sites--not in its use of color, typography, logical arrangement of contents, or ability to search," he says. "This strikes me as a rich opportunity."

If anyone can make it work, it's Simonyi. "One thing that separates really good programmers from run-of-the-mill programmers is the ability to hold enormous complexity in their heads at one time about what a program is doing in relation to what it should be doing," Thacker says. "Charles can do that like no one else."

Simonyi learned programming as a teen-ager in Budapest working a night job in a government office where he had access to a Ural II, a room-sized, Soviet-made monster programmed by punching cash-register-style keys. After arriving in the United States, he earned a degree at Berkeley, a doctorate at Stanford, and worked for Berkeley Computer Corp. before joining PARC in 1972. In '81, Simonyi joined Microsoft.

Before Bravo and Word, Simonyi says, formatting was something done to text, rather than its property. That sounds like a subtle distinction, but it meant that changes to a document ruined its formatting. "Programming is somewhat in the same state today," he says. "Any changes to the program--and there are always changes--mess up the pattern."
--Aaron Ricadela