Charles Simonyi exits Microsoft
WinInfo | at | by Mike
Microsoft programming legend Charles Simonyi is leaving the company after a 21 year stint, the company announced today. Simonyi joined Microsoft in 1981 when Microsoft had only 40 employees--it has approximately 50,000 today--and guided the company's efforts to move beyond development tools to early software applications such as Multiplan, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel.
A Hungarian native, Simonyi is most famous for creating the so-called "Hungarian" naming convention, still used by developers worldwide to create software source code that is easier to read and maintain. Simonyi says that the name of this convention was just a joke, a take on the phrase, "it's all Greek to me." "Naming conventions are supposed to make the code more readable," he said in a 1986 interview. "The joke is that the program looks so unreadable [when using my naming convention], it might as well have been written in Hungarian. But it's a set of conventions that controls the naming of all quantities in the program. 'Hungarian' is a complete jumble to the uninitiated, and that's the joke."