In Praise of Pic

“In praise of what? Pic? Pic? Pic, the old diagram generation
‘little language’ and half brother of roff (or troff or groff),
from the days when Unix was young? Yes, indeed, that pic.

“Why, in this day of convenient WYSIWYG tools, from Xfig over
the GIMP to Visio, would anybody want to make drawings using a
command-language, which needs to be compiled(!) to generate a
viewable diagram? Well, as it turns out, there are in fact a number
of excellent reasons…”

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