Wedit is a programmer's editor designed under windows 3.0, (approx 1992). It has been through many incarnations, and currently is up and running under windows 64 bit and windows XP.
Through all this years, the user interface has stayed more or less the same. You can see it by downloading lcc-win32, a compiler system where Wedit is used as the Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The URL is: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lcc-win32.
When you open Wedit you will be surprised: o No toolbars, no icons o A menu, and nothing else.
This is a very spartan user interface, similar to the Google one. You want an editor and the editor tries to show you the maximum of text, nothing else.
I have resisted the more or less general trend to have a toolbar.
Why?
In my opinion, toolbars just take precious screen real estate and give very little in functionality. Mst of the time I disable and hide the toolbarts in other IDEs when possible. The cryptic symbols never tell me anything and in most cases, they are not standard. You have to learn them by heart each one of them, what makes them unusable if you use more than one IDE.
I have concentrated my work in the substantive features of the IDE: goto definition, spelling checker, and other features that aren't found in many other concurrent products.
This doesn't mean of course that the possibilities that a graphical user interface gives the programmer aren't used. There is a window to show the messages of the compiler in the traditional way, that serves too as a window to display the results of a search or to display the information the debugger needs.
Most of the time, the interfaces I see under windows (and under linux) are too charged of unnecessary stuff, incomprehensible icons,and in general
Toolbars have been seen as 'the way forward' for some time now; one application in particular I have used (LabWare LIMS) has an almost entirely icon based interface.
To locate all the relevant menus in a traditional menu system might involve telling a user to go (for example), Menu > Output Devices > Zebra Printers..., then in the next screen, Menu > Locations > Site 1 > Offices > Admin > ITPrn4.
Through the use of the icon system, support can tell the user to press the Zebra Icon, then the Magnifying glass (search), and just select Offices > Admin > ITPrn4 from a tree display.
I agree that many developers are too gung-ho with they're implementation of icon based menus, and there is defiantly a need for us to use more standardised icons (I confuse myself sometimes), but for an application being used by hundreds of users, using a system day-in day-out, adapting to an Icon based menu seems easier to grasp.