51–60 of 427 posts
I'm also nearly sure that in the beginning it was the only way: there weren't diagonal lines drawn across the diagrams.
So: only horizontal lines or are diagonals cromulent?
Interesting perspective, which differs from my own experience though. I found some value in class and package diagrams, which proved helpful in detecting problematic relationships between packages at a very early stage. Deployment diagrams have aided me in resource planning and communicating with deployment teams. On the other hand, I've personally never used sequence diagrams beyond academical assignments or simply satisfying my curiosity.
However I definitely agree that UML is extremely bloated. It introduced a myriad of problems so that they could sell solutions in the form of courses, books and certifications. Rational's acquisition by IBM certainly didn't help matters either. And the reference guide by Booch/Rumbaugh/Jacobson is severely painful to read.
I work with non-distributed (ish) systems, and I use watered down class diagrams much more often than sequence diagrams. But even when I was working on more distributed systems, I found more value in state machines and simplified class diagrams, actually. I think most cases where you're using a sequence diagram, a state machine is a better tool. Both for thought, and for implementation. Surfacing implicit state machi…
The problem with state machines that I run into often when using them, is "multi-dimensional" states. When managing to get that right they are great, otherwise you get loads of edges...
The bad thing about UML was demanding all kind of diagrams for every project, whether it made sense to do it or not.
UML is neither the only "method over common sense" software ideology out there nor it will be the last one.
20 years later: I used it very seldom and definitely NOT in my daily software development tasks. Actually the sequence diagrams were really the most useful of them all for me too.
Spot on, I agree that sequence diagrams are super useful, I see them used all the time in FAANG. I do really wonder why UML is still taught in universities, as the article states, it's pretty useless. I took a masters Software Engineering course at Georgia Tech two years ago and a big part of the class was learning UML. That time was mostly wasted as I've never used any of it and never met anyone who has used it. It…
> I see them used all the time in FAANG. Does that mean something? Besides you saying you worked in them? It’s a question ; I don’t know.
Spot on, I agree that sequence diagrams are super useful, I see them used all the time in FAANG. I do really wonder why UML is still taught in universities, as the article states, it's pretty useless. I took a masters Software Engineering course at Georgia Tech two years ago and a big part of the class was learning UML. That time was mostly wasted as I've never used any of it and never met anyone who has used it. It…
Why the university teaches outdated useless stuff? My guesses: - For the university, it fills out offerings and takes up credit hours, keeps the tuition dollars flowing - For the teacher, it's something they already know how to teach, so it doesn't require nearly as much effort to teach as something more useful but maybe less familiar - Universities are trusted with the decisions of what to teach and don't face much…