Comment by bccdee
5 years ago
I've always really disliked UML because it tries to strictly encode a whole lot of information into diagrams, which is way too rigid and opaque for me. My eyes just glaze over when I see UML.
I don't want to have to search "what does double arrow mean UML" in order to understand a proposal. I don't want an arrow to mean something that I couldn't learn somewhere else. I'd rather have a loose informal reference diagram alongside a couple paragraphs describing the system more formally. That way, the important information can be emphasized, the unnecessary information can be glossed over, and the diagram acts as a big-picture aide rather than some kind of formal semantic notation.
That's not a fault of UML. I can't read Greek but that doesn't make it unreadable.
Everything is hard to read before you know how to read it.
Yea but, why do we have to speak in Greek in the first place?
So consulting companies can make bank teaching you how.
After convincing the CIO that 'GREEK' is the silver bullet to their problems.
/s
Because that's the language the laws are written in. If you don't speak Greek, you don't know what the law is, so you'll break it. That's a bad idea.
If you're living in the Byzantine Empire, that is.
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Yeah that's why I normally write documentation in English instead of Greek. That way, when people read it, they don't need to learn a new language.
Besides, that's only half of my criticism. Greek is at least a full language where you have the flexibility to phrase things however you want and inject detail wherever you need. UML is a very rigid language which makes it hard to emphasize certain elements over others. A text has a reading order and a logical progression; UML is spaghetti.
If you're gonna write your docs in a different language, at least pick a good one.