Co-Founder Of Intentional Software Has Left The Company

Former PARC researcher Gregor Kiczales has left Intentional Software Corp., the company he co-founded with former Microsoft exec Charles Simonyi in September. Kiczales is now a consultant to the company, according to Intentional's Web site. One person familiar with Kiczales' plans says he left the company about a month ago to return to work at the University of British Columbia, where had had been a computer science professor.

Kiczales helped pioneer aspect-oriented development technology at the Palo Alto Research Center, a subsidiary of Xerox Corp., and had worked in academia before he founded Intentional Software with Simonyi. While at PARC, Kiczales developed AspectJ, an open-source tool that can help programmers quickly make changes throughout a system. Simonyi, also a former PARC researcher, had worked at Microsoft for 21 years and helped lead the company's technical direction.

Intentional plans to develop professional programming tools that could reflect a program's design within its code, helping turn feedback from general business users into changes in a computer system. "Programmers spend a tremendous amount of time looking at code and saying, 'What the hell is going on here?' " Kiczales said in an interview last fall. The tools Intentional was developing could help organize programs' structure, making it simpler to effect changes, he said.

Kiczales is still scheduled to appear with Simonyi at a software-development conference in Santa Clara, Calif., next week; a company spokeswoman says he decided to change roles at Intentional to pursue an interest in teaching and research. Kiczales couldn't be reached for comment.

Meanwhile, PARC is expected to reveal Tuesday that it's transferred AspectJ to the open-source Eclipse consortium, which will take over development of the software. Release Candidate 1 of AspectJ version 1.1---released March 14--is the first version of the software to include contributions from a public source, a code repository for AspectJ posted on the Web in December, according to PARC. IBM founded Eclipse, a consortium of open-source projects to write Java development tools, in 2001.