
Silicon Valley's Design Renaissance (1989) - danso
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/06/business/silicon-valley-s-design-renaissance.html?pagewanted=all
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abainbridge
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".

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wangii
I 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.

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vogt
The 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.

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dredmorbius
Simple 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.

