Things that humans create with software:

– Text

– Images

– Sound

– Video

– Algorithms†

All those elements can be glued together in different ways. Images and text, for example, can be glued together to create a magazine or newspaper layout. Text, images, sound, video and algorithms can be glued together to create a video game. Separate software for gluing stuff together is quite common. (You don’t really write and edit texts or edit images with InDesign but you bring texts and images together.)

Maybe I’m wrong about this but it doesn’t seem to me as though GUIs are the exception or a special case. They seem to be quite common.

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† I’m not sure about this one. I think it deserves an extra category even though most people use text to create them. It seems wrong to me to put novels and algorithms in one category, it would be a disservice to both.

There are different ways of looking at this. In some way video and images are one and the same – you get video from glueing images together. It seems, however different enough to deserve its own category. Algorithms seem similar to me.

Maybe you can help with this, the author certainly didn't.

Let me try:

Firefox vs. Lynx

IDE vs. makefiles/make/compile

Word. vs Latex

Excel vs. ????

Outlook/Gmail vs. Pine?

Does one of those encourage expression over operation? Probably the closest is Latex, but still I don't see how it would be more expressive than what someone who spends equal time learning Word would accomplish with Word.

Because Lynx (except for its dump mode) and Pine address characters on the screen in two dimensions, I consider them to be graphical programs. They are just very limited graphics. There is a difference between a program which displays text on the screen and a program which prints its output to stdout.