The normal minimum price for a ViewTouch point of sale system is about $3,000 plus $1,000 a year for unlimited support, training and other services. The offer of ViewTouch on the new PengPod cuts $2,500 from that price and $600 a year for support, training and other services.
If you clicked on my username (which is also my trademark) then you at least have an inkling of what I've been at for the past 40 years. Thank you for your appreciation.
A lawyer with a law firm defending one of these companies contacted me and visited me last week to review prior art which I have, with the hope that I can assist them and their client in invalidating one or more of these patents. Tomorrow I will be delivering running a copy of my software to the firm to allow them to closely examine it. Most of the companies which have been threatened with patent infringement lawsuits have caved in and agreed to pay the patent holders (Priceline founder Jay Walker and others) rather than attempt to defend themselves in court, however. We'll see how it plays out.
I have this. If anyone is interested, visit my web site (where you won't see any mention of this specific project yet but where anyone can see who I am and what I do) and find my contact information there. I have provided my POS help and source code to a few people over the years so that they can establish POS businesses in their locations. I would submit many of the details of new things going on to Slashdot but there's no guarantee it would be published so instead I'll make a whitepaper available to anyone who wants it and contacts me. I'm busy with creating a next generation POS which won't require any POS computer(s) in any retail location itself. What I currently have is not really simply a POS solution but actually more of a touchscreen development framework for displays of all sizes, from the smallest to the largest, which allows people to work collaboratively across the LAN & Internet. I've been at this for several decades now and have always believed that the future will be all about touch screens everywhere. I'm not a programmer myself so if there are any programmers who want to work with me then I invite them to get in touch. There are many people I am working with already but we always need people who want to also be involved in things touchscreen related.
The ThinLinx device shown in the New York Times article has been significantly enhanced over earlier versions and we will be using it in the very near future to provide our Linux Point of Sale development platform to customers. The very low cost of this device, its very low total cost of operation and our POS development platform will be priced at a fraction of the cost of any other company using Windows and PCs for their POS system. We will also provide a BSD solution for anyone who prefers it. We have been at this for a very long time and will use the ThinLinx ARM device to replace the mini-itx platform we have been using since 2003. POS on the ThinLinx embedded ARM devices is fortified with modules such as rsync, cups, X and SSH, while notably avoiding the overhead of Java, desktop managers and relational databases. We look forward to a handheld version, too.
This 13-year-old kid has developed what I would call a graphical language which is designed to teach knowledge of the chemical elements and how they interact with each other. I don't think he realises that this is exactly what he's done - he only wanted to create a better way to learn this subject - but it looks to me like there's no question he's achieved the development of a special-purpose graphical language. If it turns out that people can learn this aspect of chemistry faster and more thoroughly, and that they can remember what they learn longer, then this validates one of my assertions, that we learn faster when using a graphical language (provided that it even exists, of course) than we do when using a spoken language, or the written form of a spoken language.
If this holds true, then another of my assertions is validated, that graphical languages will naturally spring from the minds of children and others who are dissatisfied with the status quo, and that there's no need for older people to figure out how to learn new ways to teach children - that children themselves will solve this difficult problem.
The application for a patent on this saddens me. I have had thousands of conversations in the past 25 years during which I have freely discussed all kinds of touchscreen GUI issues. Some of the conversations were about touchscreen GUI effects that I had created and some of them were about effects that would obviously make the operation of the touchscreen easier.
I had many conversations over the years dealing with this specific issue, of using the magnifying glass effect on the GUI to display the area occluded by the finger. I didn't implement this effect because I have not been doing much work on displays with a diagonal measurement of 2 to 3 inches, but it is an effect that was often the subject of conversations I've had with many people and even in some lectures I've given.
I'm sad to see that somebody has now decided to patent something that has been a common topic of touchscreen GUI conversations for many years. The patent can hardly be considered non-obvious. It could well be that the two people involved here, one a student, one a microsoft employee, are simply ignorant of the basic design issues of graphical touchscreen GUI's.
I would go so far as to say that this patent application is morally reprehensible, right up there in league with patents on seeds that have been around since the dawn of time.
I began experimenting with Infrared in 81-82, then resistive in 82-83 and capacitance in 84-85 before settling on that. In 86 I did the Comdex show and received two shoe boxes filled with business cards from people who wanted more information.
Building touchscreen systems was not easy or cheap in those days. Today we don't even need computers to put touchscreens in front of users - just a display with a wireless network connection.
It depends on what the touchscreen technology is, to some extent. I would recommend against using fingernails. What I would recommend is that when you put your finger on the display, make your touch something that is not so much of a 'poke' as a 'touch'. Seriously, don't poke and get your finger off as fast as you can - make a gentle but slightly longer lasting touch to the display and it will work much better. A touch is actually an average of multiple readings taken when you touch the screen. The slightly longer lasting touch will give the controller more information to work with and result in a more reliable result.
This difficulty is caused by the fact that you are using capacitance touchscreens and your hand is dead. Well, actually, the capacitance characteristic of your finger is significantly outside the range of the firmware setting in the controller that you are not creating enough 'disturbance' in the conductive current flowing across the screen.
Surface acoustic wave touchscreens would not have this failing. The latest capacitive touchscreen controllers would probably not have this problem. Resistive touchscreens and Infrared touchscreens would not have this problem.
One way to solve the inadequacy of your finger's capacitance 'signature' is to grab on to a wet naked woman with your other arm. This will increase your whole body's capacitance signature to the point where the capacitance controller will be able to sense the disturbance that your finger's capacitance signature causes.
One technique I invented 20 years ago seems to work well. I always made the touchbutton enough bigger than the finger that you could always see it, and as soon as you touched it a graphical effect made it seem like a light within the touchbutton had been turned on. We had red lights, green lights, blue lights and yellow lights. That was on the Atari, with 16 colors available, in 1985-6. I see this effect in use worldwide today.
I created a lot of other such effects to make graphical touchscreen guis work. I had tabbed browsing. People are still claiming they just invented this. I had virtually all of the effects that people seem to think Apple just invented. It's a hoot reading all this, I have to say. Direct manipulation of the touchscreen gui is more than 2 decades old.
Oh, and yes, some touchscreens do provide feedback. Search google for haptic or tactile touchscreen.
I spent a little while looking at the information on the linked page, and at the Aardapple (Dutch for Potato, Aard=Earth) thesis cursorially. I have to agree with your opinion of it. It's not graphical. Graphics have to represent both real and abstract concepts, not just words and numbers. Then there's the whole issue of the necessity for a graphical syntax as a requirement for a graphical language.
I spent a few years long ago trying to become a linguistic anthroplogist - the concepts of language, meaning and formal symbolic systems fascinates me but I am way too busy to spend enough time exploring them.
I have no doubt that many new graphical languages will come to exist and that, eventually, graphical programming languages will, too. I don't think they will be built from the bottom up, however - I think they will be created top-down, by people who create the components they need to create efficiencies in their own situations. This is how spoken languages arose, without a doubt.
While we are comfortable with what we perceive as the distinction between text and graphics, I suspect that if we were to get into the subject of how the brain creates an understanding of things expressed as text versus things expresses as images, the human brain may well not even make a qualitative distinction between the two. It's very deep water.
My confidence comes from having created a graphical language that can completely replace and supplant the spoken language in the context of operating a restaurant. It does rely heavily on outputting text and it's also true that it does not replace written language. It is only safe to say that people are communicating with the assistance of graphical symbols, and it's still very primitive, but at least we can say that it is a system that can be learned quickly and which does produce substantial efficiencies.
To conclude this exchange I'm grateful for your thoughts. Lots of success in your future endeavors, Patrick.
Thanks for that reply. I have a few thoughts, mostly obvious...
Sourcecode is just the human readable component closest to the machine readable component. It's not really readable to too many humans, and requires a LOT of training in the case of C and even more in C++. Of course there are people who understand the code at lower levels but they are looking at the molecules of wood in, say, a door and have no idea that the door is the big picture. The same could be said of the C and C++ programmer - unless they see the program execute they have no idea what the program actually does in its entirety. Only someone who sees the interface can do that. Whether it's an automobile, a complex software program or a building, it isn't possible that any single person understands everything about how it is created.
You mentioned that people don't use pictures to write novels. Well, there are illustrations in many old books, an aspect of novels that is less common today than in centuries past. Today people make movies, however, and although some contend that the imagery they perceive when reading is richer than the imagery they perceive when watching a movie, there's no difficulty in making the argument that the imagery perceived from watching a movie surpasses what can be perceived from reading any written description of it.
I'm also thinking of the comparison of, say, a written explanation of how to learn to do plumbing versus watching someone show you how to do plumbing, and an interactive graphical video, including graphical effects, of how to learn plumbing. These are all instructions on how to achieve something. Such a video is a language in that it can communicate ideas. To the assertion that it's not interactive as sourcecode text is, then all we have to do is add to the video the ability to edit it. It's a series of instructions - it's graphical - it's editable.
Graphical programming may not be able to be expressed completely in the same terms that text programming is expressed but again, the opposite, text programming may not be able to be expressed completely in the same terms that graphical programming is expressed. I see no problem with that - neither expression is less valid nor less useful nor less essential than the other.
Text programming is not a completed progression, not by a long shot, and neither is graphical programming. Both are very early on. I'm really only saying that we need progress in graphical programming and graphical languages in much the same way we need progress in text programming and in text representations of spoken languages. Very long temporal timescales apply.
How long have people (and countless other animals with eyes) been using their visual awareness of the world to move around, locate food, procreate and survive?
Nobody's trying to do away with books. What people who develop and use languages other than the spoken languages are trying to do is to build a better world. If the tool you need doesn't exist you build it. If the language you need doesn't exist you build it. A spoken language only requires speech and hearing. Text only requires a spoken language and, in the case of most languages, a written expression of it. A graphical language requires a similar means to express it. It's still very early in the development of graphical tools and languages. It was not much more than 20 years ago that the average person could actually even buy a graphical PC - The Atari and The Amiga, in particular.
The first Adventure games were text, as were the first Wizardry games and the like. By today's standards they are incredibly primitive, boring, etc.. At the time it was all the best programmers could do. There weren't even any graphics displays that you could afford so there was no point in writing graphical games.
But today's games are not only graphical, they are programmed virtually in their entirety by graphical tools. It is a very small step to extend the usefulness of the graphical tools used to create video games to other areas where programming is needed. One such area is in movie making. The graphical tools used to make movies are extended versions of the graphical tools used to make video games. To the extent that these graphical tools allow people to work together they are communications systems - graphical languages. As these are further extended there is less and less need for conventional text-based programming languages and they fall away.
Graphical programming languages are not arising as extensions of existing text-based programming languages. More than that, they are replacing them.
Hieroglypics sacred stone carvings controlled by the prevailing theocracy and used solely to reinforce the myth of eternal life.
They were not programmable or network transparent, they did not make it easier to interface with software and hardware systems, did not let you make a reservation at your favorite restaurant and order a prime rib dinner or let you make a video phone call to your mother in New York. They did not let you browse a catalog of 100,000 works of art or let you enjoy them in an animated stream to participate in a virtual race with 3 friends on a 65" display.
The Chinese, you should know, use pictographs, too. And Mathemeticians - they don't explore mathematical ideas with text that mimics spoken languages or with C++ syntax constructs because those languages are not at all suited to the way that they need to think about things mathematical.
Heiroglypics did a certain job very well. We don't need them any more because we have more sophisticated ways to perpetuate theocracies and myths of eternal life. What we do need is new kinds of languages, languages which let everyone talk at once, without regard to where they are, which spoken language they speak, etc.. Graphical languages do not impose such restrictions on people as spoken languages and text do. Like most people, you are struggling with the concept, but like most people, when you see them, then you'll understand the advantages of graphical languages. They're all around you already if you were to think about what you see every day.
Have you ever watched a game like Final Fantasy being built? It is not built with C++. It is built with proprietary, secret graphical programming languages that are more valuable than the games they create. I have been using graphical programming languages for 20 years. I think the difficulty here is your unnecessarily restrictive definition of graphical programming.
You make an interesting point, one that I've often considered.
It is WAY too early in the phenomenon known as software engineering for anyone to draw conclusions about what is not possible. And it is WAY too useless for anyone to try to explain to us what the people of the future will never be able to do.
People are graphical - this is why programming MUST eventually become graphical. It's that simple. And inevitable.
The people who communicate the information about the weather to you use animated graphical symbols because it is several orders of magnitude easier to present the useful significance of the vast amount of data to you that way. Animals have been dealing with reality with their brains using the input from their eyes a LOT longer than humans have been dealing with reality by reading the text syntax of programming languages. It makes sense, therefore, not only to represent the output of information graphically but also to represent the input of information graphically.
Games are all programmed graphically. It isn't even close to possible to program games using text. Text and spoken language can only take you so far. There are many other types of languages, fortunately, and many of them are, for instance, mathematical. You need to get over your anger about 'pictures' and their usefulness. Pictures aren't something that we can look at - they are something that we can use to communicate with, and to build languages out of, just like we build languages out of the sounds we can make with our lungs and throats. And if you can build a language with something you can build civilizations out of those languages. Why do you pretend you don't understand this or that you despise it?
Slashdot Mirror
The normal minimum price for a ViewTouch point of sale system is about $3,000 plus $1,000 a year for unlimited support, training and other services. The offer of ViewTouch on the new PengPod cuts $2,500 from that price and $600 a year for support, training and other services.
If you clicked on my username (which is also my trademark) then you at least have an inkling of what I've been at for the past 40 years. Thank you for your appreciation.
I don't care what you think, whoever you may be.
This is, in fact, what has happened here as well.
A lawyer with a law firm defending one of these companies contacted me and visited me last week to review prior art which I have, with the hope that I can assist them and their client in invalidating one or more of these patents. Tomorrow I will be delivering running a copy of my software to the firm to allow them to closely examine it. Most of the companies which have been threatened with patent infringement lawsuits have caved in and agreed to pay the patent holders (Priceline founder Jay Walker and others) rather than attempt to defend themselves in court, however. We'll see how it plays out.
I have this. If anyone is interested, visit my web site (where you won't see any mention of this specific project yet but where anyone can see who I am and what I do) and find my contact information there. I have provided my POS help and source code to a few people over the years so that they can establish POS businesses in their locations. I would submit many of the details of new things going on to Slashdot but there's no guarantee it would be published so instead I'll make a whitepaper available to anyone who wants it and contacts me. I'm busy with creating a next generation POS which won't require any POS computer(s) in any retail location itself. What I currently have is not really simply a POS solution but actually more of a touchscreen development framework for displays of all sizes, from the smallest to the largest, which allows people to work collaboratively across the LAN & Internet. I've been at this for several decades now and have always believed that the future will be all about touch screens everywhere. I'm not a programmer myself so if there are any programmers who want to work with me then I invite them to get in touch. There are many people I am working with already but we always need people who want to also be involved in things touchscreen related.
--Gene Mosher
but here goes...
The ThinLinx device shown in the New York Times article has been significantly enhanced over earlier versions and we will be using it in the very near future to provide our Linux Point of Sale development platform to customers. The very low cost of this device, its very low total cost of operation and our POS development platform will be priced at a fraction of the cost of any other company using Windows and PCs for their POS system. We will also provide a BSD solution for anyone who prefers it. We have been at this for a very long time and will use the ThinLinx ARM device to replace the mini-itx platform we have been using since 2003. POS on the ThinLinx embedded ARM devices is fortified with modules such as rsync, cups, X and SSH, while notably avoiding the overhead of Java, desktop managers and relational databases. We look forward to a handheld version, too.
Don't forget that this all happened 5 billion years ago.
Here you go, Patrick. Check this out.e ar-old-ceo-highlight-of-tiecon/#more-12504
http://venturebeat.com/2007/05/19/elementeos-13-y
This 13-year-old kid has developed what I would call a graphical language which is designed to teach knowledge of the chemical elements and how they interact with each other. I don't think he realises that this is exactly what he's done - he only wanted to create a better way to learn this subject - but it looks to me like there's no question he's achieved the development of a special-purpose graphical language. If it turns out that people can learn this aspect of chemistry faster and more thoroughly, and that they can remember what they learn longer, then this validates one of my assertions, that we learn faster when using a graphical language (provided that it even exists, of course) than we do when using a spoken language, or the written form of a spoken language.
If this holds true, then another of my assertions is validated, that graphical languages will naturally spring from the minds of children and others who are dissatisfied with the status quo, and that there's no need for older people to figure out how to learn new ways to teach children - that children themselves will solve this difficult problem.
At any rate, I'm impressed.
Ignorance by individuals is a fact of life, not a problem to be solved in our lifetime.
The US Patent system... now there is a problem that needs to be solved, the sooner the better.
There are far more horror stories at USP&TO than Hollywood ever produced.
Oh, and by the way, the Apple computer on the shelf here has a 3 digit serial number; it's from the first batch shipped to the east coast in mid '77.
The application for a patent on this saddens me. I have had thousands of conversations in the past 25 years during which I have freely discussed all kinds of touchscreen GUI issues. Some of the conversations were about touchscreen GUI effects that I had created and some of them were about effects that would obviously make the operation of the touchscreen easier.
I had many conversations over the years dealing with this specific issue, of using the magnifying glass effect on the GUI to display the area occluded by the finger. I didn't implement this effect because I have not been doing much work on displays with a diagonal measurement of 2 to 3 inches, but it is an effect that was often the subject of conversations I've had with many people and even in some lectures I've given.
I'm sad to see that somebody has now decided to patent something that has been a common topic of touchscreen GUI conversations for many years. The patent can hardly be considered non-obvious. It could well be that the two people involved here, one a student, one a microsoft employee, are simply ignorant of the basic design issues of graphical touchscreen GUI's.
I would go so far as to say that this patent application is morally reprehensible, right up there in league with patents on seeds that have been around since the dawn of time.
I began experimenting with Infrared in 81-82, then resistive in 82-83 and capacitance in 84-85 before settling on that. In 86 I did the Comdex show and received two shoe boxes filled with business cards from people who wanted more information.
Building touchscreen systems was not easy or cheap in those days. Today we don't even need computers to put touchscreens in front of users - just a display with a wireless network connection.
It depends on what the touchscreen technology is, to some extent. I would recommend against using fingernails. What I would recommend is that when you put your finger on the display, make your touch something that is not so much of a 'poke' as a 'touch'. Seriously, don't poke and get your finger off as fast as you can - make a gentle but slightly longer lasting touch to the display and it will work much better. A touch is actually an average of multiple readings taken when you touch the screen. The slightly longer lasting touch will give the controller more information to work with and result in a more reliable result.
This difficulty is caused by the fact that you are using capacitance touchscreens and your hand is dead. Well, actually, the capacitance characteristic of your finger is significantly outside the range of the firmware setting in the controller that you are not creating enough 'disturbance' in the conductive current flowing across the screen.
Surface acoustic wave touchscreens would not have this failing. The latest capacitive touchscreen controllers would probably not have this problem. Resistive touchscreens and Infrared touchscreens would not have this problem.
One way to solve the inadequacy of your finger's capacitance 'signature' is to grab on to a wet naked woman with your other arm. This will increase your whole body's capacitance signature to the point where the capacitance controller will be able to sense the disturbance that your finger's capacitance signature causes.
One technique I invented 20 years ago seems to work well. I always made the touchbutton enough bigger than the finger that you could always see it, and as soon as you touched it a graphical effect made it seem like a light within the touchbutton had been turned on. We had red lights, green lights, blue lights and yellow lights. That was on the Atari, with 16 colors available, in 1985-6. I see this effect in use worldwide today.
I created a lot of other such effects to make graphical touchscreen guis work. I had tabbed browsing. People are still claiming they just invented this. I had virtually all of the effects that people seem to think Apple just invented. It's a hoot reading all this, I have to say. Direct manipulation of the touchscreen gui is more than 2 decades old.
Oh, and yes, some touchscreens do provide feedback. Search google for haptic or tactile touchscreen.
Wait staff at restaurants, bars and clubs have been using graphical touch screen systems since 1985.
I know because I created the first such system.
I spent a little while looking at the information on the linked page, and at the Aardapple (Dutch for Potato, Aard=Earth) thesis cursorially. I have to agree with your opinion of it. It's not graphical. Graphics have to represent both real and abstract concepts, not just words and numbers. Then there's the whole issue of the necessity for a graphical syntax as a requirement for a graphical language.
I spent a few years long ago trying to become a linguistic anthroplogist - the concepts of language, meaning and formal symbolic systems fascinates me but I am way too busy to spend enough time exploring them.
I have no doubt that many new graphical languages will come to exist and that, eventually, graphical programming languages will, too. I don't think they will be built from the bottom up, however - I think they will be created top-down, by people who create the components they need to create efficiencies in their own situations. This is how spoken languages arose, without a doubt.
While we are comfortable with what we perceive as the distinction between text and graphics, I suspect that if we were to get into the subject of how the brain creates an understanding of things expressed as text versus things expresses as images, the human brain may well not even make a qualitative distinction between the two. It's very deep water.
My confidence comes from having created a graphical language that can completely replace and supplant the spoken language in the context of operating a restaurant. It does rely heavily on outputting text and it's also true that it does not replace written language. It is only safe to say that people are communicating with the assistance of graphical symbols, and it's still very primitive, but at least we can say that it is a system that can be learned quickly and which does produce substantial efficiencies.
To conclude this exchange I'm grateful for your thoughts. Lots of success in your future endeavors, Patrick.
Thanks for that reply. I have a few thoughts, mostly obvious...
Sourcecode is just the human readable component closest to the machine readable component. It's not really readable to too many humans, and requires a LOT of training in the case of C and even more in C++. Of course there are people who understand the code at lower levels but they are looking at the molecules of wood in, say, a door and have no idea that the door is the big picture. The same could be said of the C and C++ programmer - unless they see the program execute they have no idea what the program actually does in its entirety. Only someone who sees the interface can do that. Whether it's an automobile, a complex software program or a building, it isn't possible that any single person understands everything about how it is created.
You mentioned that people don't use pictures to write novels. Well, there are illustrations in many old books, an aspect of novels that is less common today than in centuries past. Today people make movies, however, and although some contend that the imagery they perceive when reading is richer than the imagery they perceive when watching a movie, there's no difficulty in making the argument that the imagery perceived from watching a movie surpasses what can be perceived from reading any written description of it.
I'm also thinking of the comparison of, say, a written explanation of how to learn to do plumbing versus watching someone show you how to do plumbing, and an interactive graphical video, including graphical effects, of how to learn plumbing. These are all instructions on how to achieve something. Such a video is a language in that it can communicate ideas. To the assertion that it's not interactive as sourcecode text is, then all we have to do is add to the video the ability to edit it.
It's a series of instructions - it's graphical - it's editable.
Graphical programming may not be able to be expressed completely in the same terms that text programming is expressed but again, the opposite, text programming may not be able to be expressed completely in the same terms that graphical programming is expressed. I see no problem with that - neither expression is less valid nor less useful nor less essential than the other.
Text programming is not a completed progression, not by a long shot, and neither is graphical programming. Both are very early on. I'm really only saying that we need progress in graphical programming and graphical languages in much the same way we need progress in text programming and in text representations of spoken languages. Very long temporal timescales apply.
Anybody who can correctly answer a rhetorical question deserves mod points !!
How long have people been reading books?
How long have people (and countless other animals with eyes) been using their visual awareness of the world to move around, locate food, procreate and survive?
Nobody's trying to do away with books. What people who develop and use languages other than the spoken languages are trying to do is to build a better world. If the tool you need doesn't exist you build it. If the language you need doesn't exist you build it. A spoken language only requires speech and hearing. Text only requires a spoken language and, in the case of most languages, a written expression of it. A graphical language requires a similar means to express it. It's still very early in the development of graphical tools and languages. It was not much more than 20 years ago that the average person could actually even buy a graphical PC - The Atari and The Amiga, in particular.
Good point.
The first Adventure games were text, as were the first Wizardry games and the like. By today's standards they are incredibly primitive, boring, etc.. At the time it was all the best programmers could do. There weren't even any graphics displays that you could afford so there was no point in writing graphical games.
But today's games are not only graphical, they are programmed virtually in their entirety by graphical tools. It is a very small step to extend the usefulness of the graphical tools used to create video games to other areas where programming is needed. One such area is in movie making. The graphical tools used to make movies are extended versions of the graphical tools used to make video games. To the extent that these graphical tools allow people to work together they are communications systems - graphical languages. As these are further extended there is less and less need for conventional text-based programming languages and they fall away.
Graphical programming languages are not arising as extensions of existing text-based programming languages. More than that, they are replacing them.
Hieroglypics sacred stone carvings controlled by the prevailing theocracy and used solely to reinforce the myth of eternal life.
They were not programmable or network transparent, they did not make it easier to interface with software and hardware systems, did not let you make a reservation at your favorite restaurant and order a prime rib dinner or let you make a video phone call to your mother in New York. They did not let you browse a catalog of 100,000 works of art or let you enjoy them in an animated stream to participate in a virtual race with 3 friends on a 65" display.
The Chinese, you should know, use pictographs, too. And Mathemeticians - they don't explore mathematical ideas with text that mimics spoken languages or with C++ syntax constructs because those languages are not at all suited to the way that they need to think about things mathematical.
Heiroglypics did a certain job very well. We don't need them any more because we have more sophisticated ways to perpetuate theocracies and myths of eternal life. What we do need is new kinds of languages, languages which let everyone talk at once, without regard to where they are, which spoken language they speak, etc.. Graphical languages do not impose such restrictions on people as spoken languages and text do. Like most people, you are struggling with the concept, but like most people, when you see them, then you'll understand the advantages of graphical languages. They're all around you already if you were to think about what you see every day.
Have you ever watched a game like Final Fantasy being built? It is not built with C++. It is built with proprietary, secret graphical programming languages that are more valuable than the games they create. I have been using graphical programming languages for 20 years. I think the difficulty here is your unnecessarily restrictive definition of graphical programming.
You make an interesting point, one that I've often considered.
It is WAY too early in the phenomenon known as software engineering for anyone to draw conclusions about what is not possible. And it is WAY too useless for anyone to try to explain to us what the people of the future will never be able to do.
People are graphical - this is why programming MUST eventually become graphical. It's that simple. And inevitable.
The people who communicate the information about the weather to you use animated graphical symbols because it is several orders of magnitude easier to present the useful significance of the vast amount of data to you that way. Animals have been dealing with reality with their brains using the input from their eyes a LOT longer than humans have been dealing with reality by reading the text syntax of programming languages. It makes sense, therefore, not only to represent the output of information graphically but also to represent the input of information graphically.
Games are all programmed graphically. It isn't even close to possible to program games using text. Text and spoken language can only take you so far. There are many other types of languages, fortunately, and many of them are, for instance, mathematical. You need to get over your anger about 'pictures' and their usefulness. Pictures aren't something that we can look at - they are something that we can use to communicate with, and to build languages out of, just like we build languages out of the sounds we can make with our lungs and throats. And if you can build a language with something you can build civilizations out of those languages. Why do you pretend you don't understand this or that you despise it?