I would begin by saying this is not meant to cause offense or to slag off anyone or anything in particular.
Consider the software we need as electrical or electronics engineers, such as control simulation, PCB design, mechanical design, e-mail, word processing, thermal design, magnetic design, software IDEs, schematic capture and diagram creation. It strikes me that all of these offer some fantastic open source options and some really excellent paid-for options. KiCAD is one of the best open-source programs I've ever used, Altium Designer is just beautiful. I know a lot of people love Google Sketch-up, I love Autodesk Inventor. I pay for the Microsoft Office suite which I find very good, likewise I've used the free LibreOffice suite in the past and been impressed.
Then we come to SPICE simulation which in my humble opinion are universally horrible to use. I've used LT Spice, P Spice, TINA TI and Simetrix. All of them much the same with horrible appearances, bizzare keyboard shortcuts that differ from any other software, dated looking user interfaces and symbols. There's a hodge podge of different component libraries out there. I regularly find myself with a SPICE model for a MOSFET but a TINA-TI model for a gate driver and then wasting minutes and hours trying to simulate the two together.
Why is it the case that SPICE programs are so unpleasant to use? Clearly better methods of schematic capture exist, such as KiCAD. Clearly nice user interfaces can be done cheaply, such as LibreOffice. Clearly nice result plotting can be done, such as Matlab/Simulink.
I am genuinely curious about why no one has come out with a better piece of software. I regularly see huge multinational engineering firms advertise for jobs requiring experience with LT Spice or PSpice so there's a large market for these pieces of software. It's not like there's a shortage of electronic design engineers in the world that use them.
Consider the software we need as electrical or electronics engineers, such as control simulation, PCB design, mechanical design, e-mail, word processing, thermal design, magnetic design, software IDEs, schematic capture and diagram creation. It strikes me that all of these offer some fantastic open source options and some really excellent paid-for options. KiCAD is one of the best open-source programs I've ever used, Altium Designer is just beautiful. I know a lot of people love Google Sketch-up, I love Autodesk Inventor. I pay for the Microsoft Office suite which I find very good, likewise I've used the free LibreOffice suite in the past and been impressed.
Then we come to SPICE simulation which in my humble opinion are universally horrible to use. I've used LT Spice, P Spice, TINA TI and Simetrix. All of them much the same with horrible appearances, bizzare keyboard shortcuts that differ from any other software, dated looking user interfaces and symbols. There's a hodge podge of different component libraries out there. I regularly find myself with a SPICE model for a MOSFET but a TINA-TI model for a gate driver and then wasting minutes and hours trying to simulate the two together.
Why is it the case that SPICE programs are so unpleasant to use? Clearly better methods of schematic capture exist, such as KiCAD. Clearly nice user interfaces can be done cheaply, such as LibreOffice. Clearly nice result plotting can be done, such as Matlab/Simulink.
I am genuinely curious about why no one has come out with a better piece of software. I regularly see huge multinational engineering firms advertise for jobs requiring experience with LT Spice or PSpice so there's a large market for these pieces of software. It's not like there's a shortage of electronic design engineers in the world that use them.