Comment by UncleOxidant
5 years ago
I never understood the appeal of UML. Hardware design had been done almost entirely by schematics, but then in the mid 90s HDLs (Hardware Description Languages) and logic synthesis offered increased productivity for hardware designers. Now other than very highlevel block diagrams hardware design is almost completely textual. UML seemed like schematics for software and a step backward.
That's the right perspective to look at it. It wasn't just increased productivity which brought us to HDLs, but it was the sheer impossibility of understanding or keeping track of the ever larger and more complex designs with schematics. With todays software systems we have exactly the same problem (but computer scientists apparently prefer to retry and reinvent things than to study anything old). UML (and with version 2 also SysML) finally had an equivalent textual representation, but it was much too late.