[walterbell]

2009 article by Martin Fowler on Intentional's Domain Workbench, https://martinfowler.com/bliki/IntentionalSoftware.html

> Afterwards a couple of people said it was the most important demo they'd ever seen, comparing it even to the Mother of all Demos. For many there was a sense that the whole world of software development had just changed.

[SpindleyQ]

That's the DSL DevCon demo, video here: https://channel9.msdn.com/Series/DSL-DevCon-2009/Intentional...

Best demo we ever gave while I was there, by a longshot.

[DalekBaldwin]

For the curious: it's difficult to find that particular demo on the web now, but the system didn't look too much different from its earlier incarnation at Microsoft in the '90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSnnfUj1XCQ

[walterbell]

There's a 2013 talk by Simonyi which talks about the workbench and enterprise use cases, but doesn't have screenshots, https://youtube.com/watch?v=4pT9tDmxjlg

[haspok]

I know it is not a fair comparison, but modern IDEs such as IntelliJ IDEA do pretty much everything demonstrated in this video. They build a database of the project, and let you do refactoring with the help of that.

The only thing that is notably missing from IDEA is the graphical representation: but raise your hand if you ever missed to see your program represented as a flowchart, for example. Does it actually have any real value? Perhaps, while you are learning programming.

The diagrams that are actually important and useful are mostly architecture diagrams and are impossible to create from source code - and it is also very hard to generate meaningful programs from architecture diagrams.

[coldtea]

>The only thing that is notably missing from IDEA is the graphical representation: but raise your hand if you ever missed to see your program represented as a flowchart, for example.

(raises hand).

>Does it actually have any real value?

Yes.

>Perhaps, while you are learning programming.

Or when you're trying to understand the structure of a program you've just been assigned to work on, or that you wrote years ago and have to do a change, or when you want to see the big picture, etc etc.

Ever worked with a visual language?

[haspok]

Whenever I try to understand a program, I do draw structures of it. But it is NEVER the structure of the source code as is, but some parts the main flow with the unimportant bits left out (what is unimportant depends on the goal of the task at hand), mapped in some way that aligns with the goal of the investigation. It also has to include the runtime components, eg. objects, not classes.

Watching Eric Evans talk about DDD along the example of maps was a real eye opener for me. This: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/model-to-work-evans

I tried to use tools like Enterprise Architect in the past but failed to produce anything useful with them (that includes architecture diagrams - charts based on standards never seem to be fit for what I actually wanted to communicate).

The closest I ever got to usefulness was with database structures, we did manage to generate the actual production schema from ERwin for a SQL database at one place I worked, but of course, not the stored procedures.

[coldtea]

>Whenever I try to understand a program, I do draw structures of it. But it is NEVER the structure of the source code as is, but some parts the main flow with the unimportant bits left out

While some tools might be more or less accommodating, there's nothing about visual representation per se that can't do that (including filtering the non-important parts, producing something akin to UML's interaction diagrams, etc).

[le-mark]

I remember reading that, there was a bit of hype then around Domain Driven Design, domain modelling, and domain specific languages (DSLs). I had the impression Intentional was working on an uber DSL IDE or something. This sounds like they pivoted over to some sort of semantic web[1] scraper thing.

We'll probably see SSIS and Excel integration soon...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web