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It's fun how occasionally people suggest that a graphical form of programming is the future. Whereas, this article shows that an industry that had a graphical l
by abainbridge 10y ago
It's fun how occasionally people suggest that a graphical form of programming is the future. Whereas, this article shows that an industry that had a graphical language to express logic, got rid of it and never looked back.
It's not just that the layout of the chip started being done by computers, but also, the circuit design switched from graphical to symbolic.
Once we get to a complexity level beyond toy examples, then it seems we are better doing our abstract logic manipulation symbolically than graphically.
As one of my colleagues said when comparing C with Simulink (a graphical programming language), "The thing is, I can review a C file by starting at the top. When I get to the bottom I know I've read everything".
- wangii 10y agoI would like to add one more: text is far easier to edit than graphics and everyone can do it without mouse. I guess at this point both Emacs and Vim users are united.
- vogt 10y agoThe nuance both you and the parent commenter are missing is that editing text feels like a chore to Joe/Jane User, and controlling a GUI doesn't.
- dredmorbius 10y agoSimple GUI manipulation is easy. Repetitive or complex GUI manipulation rapidly gets tedious or intractable. There are reasons people adopted powerful symbolic representations and operators. These have learning curves, yes, but also very high payoff functions.