On the one hand icons can be a great crutch when trying to use a program in a foreign language, on the other, humanity has spent thousands of years developing a rich system to convoy meaning that is thrown away when going to icons only. Sometimes it feels we are back to caveman level tech.

My personal pet peeve are washing instruction icons. Yes it is a simple easy to learn consistent system. None of which helps me when I am at the machine trying to decide what the hell this squiggle is trying to tell me. If I were smarter I would tape a decode sheet to my machine.

the koan is.

A picture is worth 10K words -- but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.