Comment by Buttons840

5 years ago

Had UML succeeded at that goal, I think it's funny that hackers would have probably built a text based language to generate the UML diagrams.

16 comments

Buttons840

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hjek  5 years ago

Those tools exists already. I used PlantUML[0] at my programming course. UML is nonsense, of course, but it was part of the curriculum, and it was more tolerable doing UML in Vim than in a graphical point-and-click editor.

[0]: https://plantuml.com/

  • avereveard  5 years ago

    > UML is nonsense

    Eh, uml is a tool. Pretending to document fully or even to have uml as ground truth is a fool errand, of course, but since our daily job involves taming complexity, any system of knowledge partitioning that one can assume everyone else understand is a godsend

kevin_thibedeau  5 years ago

It's inevitable. Most digital FPGA and ASIC development is done with HDLs despite the availability of schematic entry systems. 2D representations of behavior do not scale, are hostile to collaboration, and suffer from vendor lockin.

alexott  5 years ago

PlantUML & other tools exists for quite a long time

  • posixplz  5 years ago

    PlantUML is an excellent tool for creating visual representations of system behaviors. Because diagrams are generated from plaintext, they’re easy to maintain and version control. I use it often when designing new features and systems. You don’t need to pay attention to UML semantics to create valuable diagrams.

    • theshrike79  5 years ago

      PlantUML also integrates pretty well with different wikis. The textual representation is saved in the wiki and the image is generated on-demand.

    • alexott  5 years ago

      100% - that’s my primary usage of it. It’s easy to encode complex diagram and change it easily.

zorked  5 years ago

Hackers wouldn't touch UML with a 4000000000000 kilometer pole.

  • PurpleFoxy  5 years ago

    When I was in uni recently I was learning UML and wondered why all the FOSS tools for UML sucked. I quickly worked out it’s because no foss programmer actually uses or cares about UML

  • TeMPOraL  5 years ago

    Sure they would. As a widely recognizable set of boxes and arrow shapes, it's useful for the kind of doodling that you might want to show someone else later :).