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.

1. Graphical Design Tools
are dead.
long live graphical viewers
Dr. Ir. Philippe Faes

2. Types of Graphical Programming
● Data-flow based
● One-dimensional
● Behavioral (state-machines)
● Hybrid

3. Dataflow based
LabVIEW

4. One-dimensional
Minibloq

5. Behavioral

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

7. Why graphical entry
for electronics?
● historical
● inspection / navigation
● documentation

8. Historical

9. Inspection

10. Documentation

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

12. Graphical viewer flow

13. Graphical Data flow

14. Round-trip flow