Comment by qznc
5 years ago
UML is a language or notation. It isn't dead and I consider it still useful because a standardized notation means you don't have to explain your notation again and again. Or worse you forget to explain the notation and people are confused what that arrow or box actually means.
The promise "that with detailed enough diagrams, writing code would be trivial or even could be automatically generated" was made by "model-driven something". The idea behind that gets reinvented often. The latest one is called No-Code or Low-Code.
The problem isn't uml itself but the fact that the uml definition is separate from the code. Is still see that there can be done use of visualizing parts of the code using uml.
A related one that people keep reinventing is “dataflow programming”, where programs would get more expressive if we didn’t call and return stuff but instead data just moved around those arrows on a graph. That’s like code generation but you actually execute the graph.
I guess it does work for Excel.