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Ask HN: Is Unified Modeling Language (UML) still a thing these days?
11–18 of 18 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Unified Modeling Language (UML) still a thing these days?
#12It's a thing for architects, and sometimes product owners. Regular-old programmers could care less what they build or how or if it will work; they'd rather write code randomly than model. The Agile paradigm dictates that those regular-old programmers control the work, so most work today doesn't use rigor. If you're lucky you'll run into people using C4 diagrams and ADRs, but more frequently "big ball of mud" diagrams.
Re: Ask HN: Is Unified Modeling Language (UML) still a thing these days?
#13Ah, no. Though I've occasionally found auto-generated db schema diagrams useful, I've never had any practical use for UML diagrams.
Re: Ask HN: Is Unified Modeling Language (UML) still a thing these days?
#14Class diagrams are way too fine grained to bother with and most IDEs have good enough tools for exploring large code bases. Service architecture diagrams and message sequence charts are super helpful. Especially for communicating with other teams and for making design proposals. I wouldn't be able to get traction on a new project without them, people really need pictures to see how something that doesn't exist yet will fit together with existing components.
Re: Ask HN: Is Unified Modeling Language (UML) still a thing these days?
#15Sequence diagrams can be a very useful tool for understanding things.
Re: Ask HN: Is Unified Modeling Language (UML) still a thing these days?
#16No, and it’s bizarre they still teach it.
Re: Ask HN: Is Unified Modeling Language (UML) still a thing these days?
#17I would say most of the industry just "wants to get it done", everyone is really confused, lack of communication, no time to design, customers changing project direction fast. Requirements/design/diagrams are replaced with tasks in Jira because that is "agile"
I would say if it is a new project it's useful to do some UML diagrams to get through discussions. But after the first milestones it is impossible to keep diagrams updated in sync with code, they normally just get left behind
For the reasons above anything with arrows works, it does not need to be UML, but it is a useful to know, making diagrams that present all in a useful way is hard and all knowledge and thinking is welcome
My current company we just have a designer doing/updating wireframe/mockups after meeting which then we discuss
Re: Ask HN: Is Unified Modeling Language (UML) still a thing these days?
#18My experience matches yours. We draw diagrams all the time to explain systems, but we rarely use UML to do it.
If you think about it, the point of using diagrams is to simplify an explanation. Making explainers and listeners learn a formal language just to understand diagrams defeats this purpose.