To put a bit of historical context around this: In 1975 there weren't many viable display options. Personal graphic workstations were science fiction. This was five years before the then forward-thinking "3M" initiative, where "3M" referred to a machine with 1 Mb of disk, 1 megahertz of processor, and a megapixel (1024 by 1024 by 1 bit) display. Sounds silly now, but this was before the Apple ][, the IBM PC, or the first Mac. In that context, it's not surprising PDL was text-based. Research in graphics design techniques hadn't advanced very far beyond what could be done by pen/pencil and plotter.

Roll the clock forward two and a half decades. Laptops with 1024 x 840 flat-panel graphics are a commodity, years of methodology wars have reached a momentary truce that's given us UML, and drawing tools like Visio have templates that support it. Getting hardcopy takes a few seconds (or minute, if you have to warm your laser printer up), and costs a few pennies per page.

Meanwhile, on the software front, languages have evolved that let us specify class structures and interfaces separate from implementation. And people have decided that reviewing these isn't such a bad thing after all.

PDL was overtaken by technology. Pseudo code remains a viable design technique to be applied now and then, but it's more often than not used as footnotes on UML diagrams.

In reply to Re: program design language - a reality? by dws
in thread program design language - a reality? by ailie

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.