If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then there should also be some arrangement of planetary origins to describe the difference between hardware and software engineers. There are fundamental differences between the way these two groups look at the same system, and that difference can get in the way of creating a system.

I have long imagined a system where a software engineer could examine a representation of a proposed system that was meaningful to him. This representation would be on a tool with a button that could be pressed to represent the same system in a hardware-centric view. Personally I think this is more feasible than a common language between these two groups, but others think differently. That is the crux of an article out of EE Times by someone with yet another "universal" design tool.

The problem with this concept is that the result will always be a compromise. As (mostly) a software guy I want something that shows what I need to see in a manner that is as unambiguous as possible. Resistor values and gate counts are noise as far as I'm concerned.

Larry Mittag