Criticism
User interfaces based on the WIMP style are good at abstracting workspaces, documents, and their actions. Their analogous paradigm to documents as paper sheets or folders, makes WIMP interfaces easy to introduce to novice users. Furthermore their basic representations as rectangular regions on a 2D flat screen make them a good fit for system programmers. Generality makes them very suitable for multitasking work environments. This explains why the paradigm has been prevalent for more than 20 years, both giving rise to and benefiting from commercial widget toolkits that support this style. However, several human–computer interaction researchers consider this a sign of stagnation in user interface design as the path of least resistance forces developers to follow a particular way of interaction. WIMP is not well suited to some applications, they argue, and the lack of technical support increases difficulty for the development of interfaces not based on the WIMP style. This includes application that require devices that provide continuous input signals, show 3D models, or portray an interaction that has no defined standard widget. Andries van Dam calls these interfaces post-WIMP GUIs.
Some circles use the term as a pejorative, to indicate someone cannot perform useful work without a graphical environment, who relies too heavily on GUIs. This assumes of course that CLI tools of equal or greater functionality are available.
Read more about this topic: WIMP (computing)
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“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
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“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)