Graphical Design Tools are dead.

long live graphical viewers

Dr. Ir. Philippe Faes

Types of Graphical Programming

● Data-flow based● One-dimensional● Behavioral (state-machines)● Hybrid

Dataflow based

LabVIEW

One-dimensional

Minibloq

Behavioral

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

Why graphical entry for electronics?

● historical● inspection / navigation● documentation

Historical

Inspection

Documentation

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

Graphical viewer flow

Graphical Data flow

Round-trip flow