Re: gEDA-user: fritzing

[al davis <ad252@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thursday 07 May 2009, John Griessen wrote:
> The ones I know circuit designers use are verilog, perl and
> python. and then there are the many Matlab programmers...
>
> Are any of those what you're thinking of Al?

Yes, sort of, if you look only at popular existing languages.

The real point is that any application has its language that 
people speak in.  The computer language must match that.

This was one of the major new features of SPICE, back in the 
70's.  It introduced a language for describing circuits that is 
truly meaningful to circuit designers.

In the years that followed, the language has become obsolete 
because it was not sufficiently expressive and too irregular, so 
new languages like Spectre and the structural subset of Verilog 
have evolved that still present the circuit view.

The behavioral part of Verilog-AMS evolved out of that for 
making mathematical models of devices while staying in the 
circuit description comfort zone.  This behavioral language will 
never replace the netlist part, but it beats C by a wide margin.  
It takes care of things like derivatives, so you can do things 
like enter device equations like you see them in texts or 
papers.

I have seen lots of little circuit simulators with input formats 
based on some other language.  For example, the circuit 
description might be a syntactically correct Python program.  
(or any other language.  It doesn't matter.)  None of these are 
successful because they are fundamentally not circuits, or not 
seen as circuits.

Similar arguments can be made in just about anything else.  A 
proper language is one specifically designed for the application 
at hand.  It is hard to do because someone needs to have skills 
in both domains .. the application domain and programming 
languages.

Maybe this is one of the points of Fritzing, and user 
friendliness in general.  Those things on the screen are 
transistors and resistors.  Not symbols or files.  A schematic 
and layout are two different views of the same thing.  A netlist 
is yet another view of the same thing.

To be truly both expert friendly and beginner friendly, we need 
to see that, and make it true.



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