Ask HN: What Has Replaced UML?

Interested to hear any answer, my opinion is nothing has. However I think this is a struggle of the domain UML solves, as I am not too sure UML ever established itself as a goto diagram/modelling language?

What replaced flowcharts? Um, pretty much nothing. We just quit making flowcharts, and we found that we could get by just fine without them. (In fairness, when structured programming replaced goto-based programming, we didn't need flowcharts nearly as often in order to keep track of what was going on.)

We mostly quit doing UML because for most people, most of the time, it mostly wasn't worth it. It didn't provide enough value to be worth the effort. So what replaced it was usually nothing.

There's a lot of truth in that :D

On the whole I think that the value of "diagrams as the source of truth" turned out to be almost non-existant for much the same reasons that mostly we prefer source code over visual programming environments.

Flowcharts were never all that useful (to me at least) because they were harder to read than the pseudocode!

I use draw.io (diagrams.net) or Miro depending on what's in commonest use at the current Org for informal data flow diagrams and the like. Does Microsoft have some kind of Visio descended monster in Office 365? I hope I never have to find out!

I use PlantUML¹ for sequence diagrams² and state diagrams. So much so that I wish GitHub and its brethren would support PlantUML natively in their flavours of Markdown.

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¹The IntelliJ plugin is mercifully good

²Or swimlanes.io is quite good for these, especially for sharing ephemeral stuff

Maybe not a replacement, but mermaid-js is a happy middle ground for me.

Checkout the C4 model (https://c4model.com) if you're looking for a easy but detailed method to describe your software architecture. I my experience it works well in teams, you can let any dev contribute since there are only a handful of rules/notations.