The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Sequence Diagrams in MermaidJS • Hacker News Board

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Sequence Diagrams in MermaidJS

#111

Post by kcartlidge » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 5:44 AM UTC

da39a3ee wrote: post #110

kcartlidge wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For your point (1) I can offer you https://sequence-diagrams.netlify.app which is my years-old quick diagramming tool for Mermaid and works similarly. For your point (2) I offer the same alternative, but with the caveat that of the 3 criteria of elegant/thoughtful design, beautiful diagrams, and export functionality, it meets only the last 2 (and I claim little personal credit in any case).

That looks like a fun project! But I'm not aware of a reason why anyone wouldn't want to use swimlanes.io.

> But I'm not aware of a reason why anyone wouldn't want to use swimlanes.io

Totally fair; personal preference. For me I could quite easily replace swimlanes in your comment with my own site, and I'm sure others would have alternatives that also seem an obvious first pick - there's rarely one size fits all.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Sequence Diagrams in MermaidJS

#112

Post by nativecoinc » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 11:13 AM UTC

urxvtcd wrote: post #100

nativecoinc wrote: post #43

I guess it’s effective because it is similar to Markdown and other lightweight stuff: things like bullet items are just written like bullet items, with hyphens (or similar). You write it how you want it to be displayed. Granted for a diagram it’s more complicated since it’s a graph and not a tree, and you write it with declarative arrows rather than as ASCII art, but perhaps that in practice strikes a nice balance be…

> That aside the “unreasonable effectiveness” allusion to “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” is clearly overwrought. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It's a meme title, I've seen it a couple of times on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Unreasonable+Effectiveness Also see: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Yes, an allusion is indeed a kind of meme...

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Sequence Diagrams in MermaidJS

#113

Post by urxvtcd » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 9:06 PM UTC

nativecoinc wrote: post #112

urxvtcd wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That aside the “unreasonable effectiveness” allusion to “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” is clearly overwrought. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It's a meme title, I've seen it a couple of times on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Unreasonable+Effectiveness Also see: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Yes, an allusion is indeed a kind of meme...

My point was it was no allusion to the original at all. The format took a life of its own, and is now a meme, and the author himself confirms it was the case in the sibling comment. No need to pull that scary ellipsis out.