Graphical Design Tools are Dead — long live graphical viewers.
Discussion about the limits of graphical programming and the future of graphical viewers.
Presented at the 2014 PLC2 forum.
6. Niches
Graphical programming is successful in niches:
● educational and non-programmer
● flow-based: audio, video, measurement data
● formal behavior (FSM)
● graphical design (GUI, games, ...)
● and some domain specific sub-niches
11. Disadvantages of graphical
● lack of standard data format
○ vendor dependent
● difficult to compare two versions
● captures limited complexity
● debugging can be harder
○ tool flow works on generated HDL code