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Message: [QUOTE="Andy, post: 4166703"] I seem to recall a similar argument when assemblers gave way to higher level language compilers... This change in digital hardware design is not unlike the change from one-man furniture shops to furniture factories. The craftsmen of the one-man shops painstakingly treated every detail as critical to their product: a chair. And the result was an exquisite piece of furniture, albeit at a very high price, and very low volume (unless you hired a lot of one man shops at the same time). Circuit designers are no different (being one myself, dating back to those "I can do that function in one less part" days gone by). But the target has changed. We no longer need a chair, we need a stadium full of them. And we need the elevators, climate control, fire suppression, lighting, and all the other support systems, to go along with them. Perhaps we should take a step back, and look at what we really need (hint: a place for a lot of people to watch an event, while seated most of the time). Now I can optimize my stadium to recognize that all of my seats don't need to be finely crafted pieces of furniture. But I don't know that until I focus on the requirements: "What must my project do?" So, instead of finding a way to describe the project as a collection of specific chairs, elevators and fire extinguishers, we need to describe it as a set of desired behaviors, and then, through some process (hopefully semi-automated), convert that description into an optimized design for the stadium. Could the craftsman and his tools have done that? What do you want from the tools, a collection of exquisitely crafted chairs, or an efficient stadium? Andy [/QUOTE]

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