Memmert has been testing aspect-oriented tools from IBM for three years. Big companies won't adopt the approach, he says, because the technology is too unproven. But Memmert says he's done "lots of work" with aspect tools for smaller companies that have hired him to fix broken apps within three or four days.

The tools help him work quickly and document his changes. "Cosmos is complex, but it gives you an easy-to-use list of all the things you've created," he says. Instead of a 300-page requirements document, 10 diagrams, and a giant application, Cosmos generates more manageable chunks of descriptions and code that are hyperlinked together.

Aspect-oriented programming is the product of more than a decade of research at PARC, IBM, Northeastern University, and the University of Twente, in the Netherlands. It continues a trend in computer science of making software programs smaller and more manageable by sharing and reusing more code across their parts. "It's the next generation of software engineering," says John Seely Brown, director emeritus of Xerox PARC.

In the early days of computing, software was written by professional programmers who worked in binary strings of 1's and 0's or in assembly languages that let programmers write instructions using abbreviations for commands--load, or multiply--followed by a number that corresponded to a location in the computer's memory where the instructions would be executed. In 1957, IBM's Fortran--considered the first high-level computer language--let programmers write more abstract code that was less wed to a computer's physical properties. Programmers using Fortran and its descendants, such as Bell Labs' C, could write sets of instructions called subroutines that an app could then invoke repeatedly.

By the late '60s and early '70s, object-oriented languages such as Simula, developed at the nonprofit Norwegian Computing Center, and Smalltalk, developed at PARC, made programs even more modular and easier to understand by grouping related instructions and data in hierarchies. Smalltalk's popularity in the '80s led to the development of modern object-oriented languages such as Java and C++.

"Aspect-oriented programming lives along this curve," says Brian Barry, chief scientist at Object Technology International, an IBM subsidiary responsible for creating the VisualAge, WebSphere, and Eclipse development tools. "The advantages are similar to object-oriented programming: I've found a way to write less software."

At Microsoft, Simonyi led a team of about 10 researchers exploring intentional technology, which could capture design edicts communicated in memos or conversations within a program's running code. Intentional has licensed from Microsoft about 10 patents for technology developed by Simonyi's team at Microsoft Research, and it's given Microsoft the right to negotiate first to license its technology or buy the company should it come up for sale.