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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“... criticism ... makes very little dent upon me, unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
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—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)