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Nomnoml

nomnoml.com

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Re: Nomnoml

#111

Post by withinboredom »

totetsu wrote: post #36
sBqQu3U0wH wrote: post #27

These tools show up from time to time here, and I can appreciate the technical side of things and effort put into building the tool. However, I cannot imagine using something like this in practice - either at work or for my own uses. It's so much easier just to select, drag and drop graphical elements instead of spending time learning a specific markup language and typing everything out, hoping that the elements will…

I got quite far asking an LLM to type it out for me. and I got some nice diagrams to visualize the project I was thinking about.

I decided to ask the bing bot to type one out for me, and it told me "no". When I asked it why, it told me it was because it wasn't "creative" so it wrote me a poem in Python. I then asked it to write a diagram that was funny. It told me "no" because it wouldn't be creative.

:sigh: technology.

Re: Nomnoml

#112

Post by withinboredom »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #48
pja wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s just the nomnomml demo website - the text is editable so that you can see live updates in the rendered UML diagram. The underlying js library will render straight to an HTML canvas or to SVG from a Node.js program. You can run it from the command line if you want to.

I know it is editable, it's just inconvenient af to edit the text if the diagram is being drawn right over it.

you can move it out of the way.

Re: Nomnoml

#113

Post by carapace »

hoosieree wrote: post #109
ahartmetz wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, is it even still ...allowed... to have Free / Open Source software that does not live on GitHub? Because that exists. Though admittedly it's usually mirrored on GitHub.

If you're not freely donating your time and energy to improving the proprietary dataset that powers Copilot, can you even call yourself Open Source?

It's truly astonishing and disheartening how completely MS has routed the Free and Open Source movement. (Even before you get to Copilot.)

Re: Nomnoml

#114

Post by agileAlligator »

hk__2 wrote: post #35
sBqQu3U0wH wrote: post #27

These tools show up from time to time here, and I can appreciate the technical side of things and effort put into building the tool. However, I cannot imagine using something like this in practice - either at work or for my own uses. It's so much easier just to select, drag and drop graphical elements instead of spending time learning a specific markup language and typing everything out, hoping that the elements will…

> Maybe it's not too bad for very simple diagrams but unmanageable for anything complex On the contrary, I use drag&drop tools for very simple diagrams but prefer using PlantUML for anything complex because its text-based interface makes it easy to generate, diff or store in a git repository. The best of both worlds would be a text-based tool to hold the semantics of your graph, and then a drag&drop interface to fix…

> The best of both worlds would be a text-based tool to hold the semantics of your graph, and then a drag&drop interface to fix the layout.

Exactly this, I wonder why no one has come up with it yet. Maybe you could embed the layout details like coordinates of elements inside the markup in a separate section?

Re: Nomnoml

#115

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

z500 wrote: post #95
CapsAdmin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It blows my mind though how the moment that someone offers free stuff, the first comments are people asking for more free stuff. If you create something from the perspective of "I had to make this on my unpaid spare time..", then requests for additional work do seem annoying. But is that the case here? If I made a utility I thought other people could also benefit from I'd personally be open to suggestions. I'd igno…

I have a tool I've been working on on and off, and after several years it's actually working. But I was barely smart enough to do even that. If people actually started using it and asking for features that would be a nightmare for me lol

“No” is your friend in such scenarios. “Because I made it for me and I don’t need that” is your other friend if people are insistent. (A screenshot of the “fork” button on Github might be a third, rather muscly friend who doesn’t like to talk.)

I do understand the desire to be helpful but one should put themself first when it comes to fulfilling requests. Just in case anyone gets here and is similarly discouraged.

(Good job finishing the features you wanted!)

Re: Nomnoml

#116

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

monkeydust wrote: post #101

Is this type of framework the future of email perhaps? For one I loathe long directionless emails and increasingly my mind starts wondering to something more structured to convey intentions and ideas - should add I am on the business side not an engineer.

> something more structured to convey intentions and ideas

I struggle to think of what this might be without it turning into some other natural language. For example, the tool that’s used to convey intentions and ideas in these comments is written English, which certainly has its own structure.

Re: Nomnoml

#117

Post by Pxtl »

sBqQu3U0wH wrote: post #27

These tools show up from time to time here, and I can appreciate the technical side of things and effort put into building the tool. However, I cannot imagine using something like this in practice - either at work or for my own uses. It's so much easier just to select, drag and drop graphical elements instead of spending time learning a specific markup language and typing everything out, hoping that the elements will…

Either way, regardless of whether it's easier - the software world is driven by the power of plain text. Text is king. Text lets you diff, lets you git, lets you pull-request, lets you grep, etc.

Look at the popularity of Markdown, a syntax that is just "simple html but it's easy to read in plain-text form". Or YAML, which is just "JSON and XML that doesn't make your eyes bleed, but has the worst type-inference ideas ever".

Yes, GUI tools can help. Doing image-links in Markdown is a PITA. Ditto good-looking tables. But still, the idea of "human-friendly-text-first" formats is valid.

Doing the same for UML just makes sense to me.

Now obviously there are implementation details I disagree with, both in the format and the renderer. But the idea is sound.

Re: Nomnoml

#118

Post by jasonjmcghee »

candiddevmike wrote: post #85
fkyoureadthedoc wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use mermaid sequence diagrams all the time and much prefer them to using whatever app. GitHub can render them which is nice. Refactoring them is easier than dragging 20 boxes around too in my opinion. I've done a couple Gantt charts. I see they support c4 which I need to try. We don't have many options of approved diagramming software where I work though. Omnigraffle which I don't care much for, and Visio which doe…

I wish there was a way to easily export mermaid diagrams to PNG or PDF. Right now sharing the diagrams, especially ones that scroll, is a pain in the ass.

There is https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli

Re: Nomnoml

#119

Post by tannhaeuser »

layer8 wrote: post #45
vidarh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and in many case you also somewhat want something which is less precise (and verbose) then UML theoretically is This tends to be "the" big problem with UML (and similar): Very few people care about, or have a reason to, stick 100% to UML. They want to "speak diagrams", and just like written or spoken language, our syntax and semantics is context dependent and dependent on the dialect and speech patterns and underst…

It’s a pity, because one benefit of UML would be that everyone speaks the same language. Before UML, there were many different modeling notations [0], and the goal with UML was to create a single interoperable unified language. This was successful insofar as it displaced the previous object modeling languages. However, it would be nice to have that benefit of a modeling lingua franca not only in modeling tools, but f…

UML sucked so much, it took OOP down the drain along with it. Unfortunately, UML also had to contaminate nascent BPM modeling, by making BPMN a fscking "profile" of UML. I'll never forget the look of once motivated process modelers when they learned they need "stereotypes" and such - the result of their modeling was more like a psychoanalysis and beyond useless. Ever had to deal with RMI, EMF, MOF, and UML's weird and unsound meta-modelling "in itself" for exchanging model data modulo the worst of XML? To hell with it.

Re: Nomnoml

#120

Post by Pxtl »

agileAlligator wrote: post #114
hk__2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe it's not too bad for very simple diagrams but unmanageable for anything complex On the contrary, I use drag&drop tools for very simple diagrams but prefer using PlantUML for anything complex because its text-based interface makes it easy to generate, diff or store in a git repository. The best of both worlds would be a text-based tool to hold the semantics of your graph, and then a drag&drop interface to fix…

> The best of both worlds would be a text-based tool to hold the semantics of your graph, and then a drag&drop interface to fix the layout. Exactly this, I wonder why no one has come up with it yet. Maybe you could embed the layout details like coordinates of elements inside the markup in a separate section?

I've seen tools that work like this - Microsoft's earlier kicks at entity framework tried to do it for SQL table block diagrams. They would constantly get out-of-sync as merges happened and were generally a pain to manage.

I'd rather a tool just let me give it hints of "this is an important block put it somewhere high visibility" and "this is semantically the root of a tree" and stuff like that, then just focus on having a good clean layout engine.

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