Charles Simonyi

Charles Simonyi led the team of programmers which developed Bravo, the first WYSIWYG word processor, for the first personal computer, Alto, at Xerox PARC. Simonyi then moved on (1981) to Microsoft where he oversaw the development of some of today's most popluar software packages, such as Microsoft Word, Excel and Multiplan.

While at Microsoft he attempted to introduce a software management method he had devised, metaprogramming, which had been the subject of his doctoral dissertation. Metaprogramming involved a top-down organizational hierarchy in which all design decisions were made by a "metaprogrammer" and all coding tasks were delegated to subordinates. The technique did not succeed.

He left Microsoft abruptly in 2002 after 21 years there to co-found, with business partner Gregor Kiczales, a company called Intentional Software.

He is perhaps most famous for inventing the naming convention known as Hungarian notation.